I was contacted by Rapt Studio, a global design agency based in San Francisco, to illustrate a 28' x 10' mural at the newly acquired PayPal office in Manhattan. Until that Summer, PayPal had been sharing their offices with eBay on Sixth Ave. Rapt was tasked with designing the newly acquired 95,000 square foot office, and I was brought onboard to create a mural for one of their open spaces. All within a 2 week period. After a quick brief they sent me the elevation for the wall. Time to start drawing!

If you have been following my work lately, you will probably see a trend of interior design and architecture. These are two of my passions and coupled with good composition and colour I knew this could be a killer piece. I wanted to show a couple of locations; A trendy modern loft, an old pub, a middle eastern styled outdoor area, a garden, and a shop. So I started pulling reference images from various sources and placing them around the template.

The brief stated that the were looking for an art piece that could show where the online payment system may be used, without explicitly showing the functions or getting too literal. I sent the above sketch to the client and they loved it and advised me to keep going in this direction and explore colour options.

 

I began with a simple colour palette of blues (which are official paypal colours), reds, yellow, and greens. I then started drawing out angular, geometric shapes in photoshop, still keeping things loose and abstract, I wanted to feel out where the elements of the wall would go.

 

At this point everything was ready to go to final. The .psb file became very large, I was working with a 20GB file by the end which took about 5 hours to upload and send to the client. I was quite pleased with the work and the client was also. I think the biggest challenge while working on a piece of this magnitude is attemting to understand the transfer of size. Considering I was working on a 27" iMac, I had to be constantly zooming in and out and attempting to wrap my brain around how this image would transfer into its full scale.

 

Some of the venting was changed last minute which ended up blocking out one of my favourite parts of the mural. I was pretty disappointed by this but had to let it go. However the vinyl printer and installed did an excellent job at matching the colours and applying the artwork.