Brightening Up The Bus Stops

No clients, no direction. Just doing for fun, and to brighten up the neighbourhood.

So to give a little history/context to this project… I recently moved back to where I grew up in Black Creek. My family took over my parents old house, and we built them a suite off of it for them to move in to. This bus stop was built by my dad (and other parents on the street) 30+ years ago, and they’ve been helping with the up keep ever since.

Being 30+ years old, with the various repairs and tagging/vandalism over the years, it was looking a little worn out, and becoming a bit of an eye sore. I wanted to help brighten things up and give mine, and other kids on the street, a nicer place to start their school days. So on the Thanksgiving long weekend, I decided to pick up some nice vibrant paint and see where it would take me.

I was originally planning to just add some colour blocks and let it be, but after getting the base colours down, I was concerned I just made a more vibrant canvas for taggers, and from experience of doing various other public art/murals I know that the likelihood of vandalism on a mural is way lower than a blank/solid coloured wall.

I sketched some simple/stylized images of some of my favourite wild life I’ve seen in the area, and came up with the plan & layout for the mural. Thankfully I learned a lot from local muralist, Nick Hutton-Jay, when designing and helping to paint the mural on the Edible Island building, so I got to implement some techniques I wanted to try solo, and use a limited colour palette for this design.

Since the fall weather is fairly inconsistent with temp and moisture, I slowly painted over a month or so (doing a couple hours here and there when my schedule/weather lined up).

The whole time, I was pleasantly surprised with how many people would honk, yell, or stop and share their enthusiasm and appreciation for brightening up this little part of their lives. And since I have a decent amount of paint left over, and love getting away from my computer screen. I’m now scoping out other bus stops that could use a little makeover when when things warm/dry up in the Spring.