2012 Obama Campaign Headquarters Mural In Minneapolis

SIR Designs and Paints Mural For Minneapolis Obama 2012 Campaign Headquarters

In November 2011, SIR contacted Minnesota's Regional Headquarters for the Obama 2012 Campaign regarding the creation of a Mural on the West interior wall of their offices. We were given full creative license to develop a composition and paint on the wall. 

Within three days, Salmi and Regner teamed up with local graphic designer Stephan Peters (www.stephan-peters.com) and had developed ten rough designs. Our objective for this project was to create a marriage between Minnesota and the existing Obama 2012 identities. In doing so, the wall would be an iconic branding piece for the offices. To achieve this, we decided early to maintain a flat, crisp, clean and bold graphic quality to the design of the image. 

Our first concept was to extend the horizontal lines contained in the center of Obama's "O" and create a rolling, rural field landscape. By integrating lines outside of the logo with the red and white stripes inside of the logo, the metaphor of a "sunrise over America" that is contained in the logo would be strengthened while the fields proposed in the design connected the landscape to rural Minnesota. 

With a starting point, we held a design meeting and roughed out some additional concepts. Peters took the notes and created six of the ten final rough designs that we submitted to the campaign. Every design was specific to the dimensions of the wall and conscious of the rectangular pillar that breaks the picture plane up into three sections. 

The selected image was a clever adaptation by Peters of our first design. He focused specifically on an abstracted and simplified graphic illustration of the Minneapolis skyline as the centerpiece of the painting. Alternating stripes create the landscape and ties the identity of Minneapolis back to Obama's logo. Rolling hills, smaller buildings and silos offer contrast to the height of Minneapolis skyscrapers and include rural areas of Minnesota in the office identity piece. 

It was great to work with the Obama campaign and we would love the opportunity to apply this same concept to cities all over the country if given the opportunity. 

To view a time-lapsed video of the mural shot by SIR, visit:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5meg0b1MOGc

We would all like to thank Lou Pieh and Anna Germundson at the Minneapolis Obama 2012 Office for being our helpful contacts on the project, Brad Daniels (http://braddaniels.com/) for his assistance in editing our timelapse video and the Broken Bicycles for allowing us to feature their song "I Wanna Be Your Friend" in our video.

-SIR 

 Brandon Regner:     Co-founder, Co-president

 Allan Salmi:            Co-founder, Co-president

Regner and Salmi at 2011 Envision Artopia

photo credit: Denis Jeong


Fashion, beer, music and live painting made this event a smash hit. I would like to once again thank Holly and Dayna Besser (www.daynabesser.com) from the City Pages for the opportunity to paint at Envision Artopia Fall 2011. 


To view a full article on the event and view the slideshow, click on these 


links:http://blogs.citypages.com/dressingroom/2011/09/envision_artopia_fall_2011_minneapolis.php


http://www.citypages.com/slideshow/envision-artopia-fall-2011-photo-booth-35172047/62/


The painting that we created was auctioned off at the end of the evening with proceeds benefitting the Young Survival Coalition. I had a blast working on the painting and look forward to our next project and / or event.

Regner and Salmi at E3

Thank you to everybody at Street Factory Media, EA Games, Ford Focus and Team Detroit. The project in Los Angeles was a great experience, a lot of fun and a ton of work. Allan and I arrived in LA on June 4th, 2011 and tracked down the remaining materials necessary for the project.

We arrived at the Los Angeles Convention Center around 2:00 pm with all of our materials and began construction of the canvas stretchers. We built the 23' x 12' structure out of 2'' x 4'' douglas fir on site over two afternoons with an improvised workspace and minimal tools. The design that we came up with was a three panel construction, each 12' tall with two 8' wide panels flanking a 7' wide panel in the middle. The following day was spent stretching and priming the canvasses.

The end of the second night was spent making approximately three gallons of wheat paste in preparation for the next morning. We arrived on site by 8:00 a.m. and erected the structure. The panels were free standing and rested one foot away from the wall with a support structure designed and built by Allan and myself.

By afternoon, the panels were completely in place and we began by wheat pasting our image onto the canvas. The image was a beautiful vector line drawing that had been blown up to scale. After the wheat paste had dried, we began color mixing basic mid-tones and attacked the canvas with paint. Allan started with the male figure's shirt while I worked from the top down.

The following day, we arrived at the convention center at 8:00 A.M again to get the paint moving early. By noon, the Expo was in full swing and we were already getting buzz about the project. We met and spoke to many awesome people who were excited about the project and happy to give us encouragement for the next two days.

Typical days ranged from between 12 hours and 18 hours of work during the week that we were there. All of the color mixing was based off of primary red, yellow and blue with white and a quart of black. On the final day, Allan and I spend thirty-three hours straight painting to complete the image. We had a blast working this hard on the project and look forward to our next opportunity to exhibit our skills and dedication to new and challenging projects.

You can find images, reviews, write-ups and a time-lapse video shot by Street Factory Media on the links below.

http://www.cva.edu/news_events/detail.php?ID=244

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLm8Mcr1FIg

http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/e3-2011-brandon-regner-and-allan-salmis-the-simsford-mural/