Henson Pig Trail 2017 Gloucester blog 02

Henson Pig Trail 2017 Gloucester blog 02

  The project is to create three painted pig 'sculptures' as part of a street art/ trail project for the City of Gloucester, UK. The trail will be open to the public during the summer months of 2017 and then auctioned off for the benefit of several charities. Further details can be found here.

The first image shows the pigs after delivery and placed in the work space. I will initially work on one design (Piggy Bank) with some work on the second (Floating Floyd), just to have something to work on while awaiting paint to dry on the first. The third will be left as is for a short while. The designs can be seen in an earlier post here.
The first process is to pencil out the design, using my 2D designs created in Photoshop, as a good guide to placement of the elements on to the 3 dimensional form of the pigs. Once all the elements of the design fit satisfactorily on the sculpture, I then tidy up the drawings, following which I mask parts of the design using masking tape, the reason being it helps to make painting sections easier, in this case the coins and lettering are masked out so as to make applying the pigs, pink base colour, easier to do.

Masking tape on some areas of the pig

From then on it is a case of straight forward painting each section across the sculpture, using acrylic paint, though it should be noted that all the painted areas typically needs 2-3 coats of paint for a full bodied colour, meaning that each sculpture is painted a number of times. For the painting of the coins originally I was going to use ordinary yellow/ gray colours but then came across the 'metallic' acrylic paint in a shop and thought that would make a nice addition to the paintwork.

'Piggy Bank' and 'Floating Floyd' at the beginning of painting

Metallic paint added for the coins on 'Piggy Bank'

Rear of  'Piggy Bank'

'Piggy Bank' coin painted