Henson Pig Trail 2017 Gloucester blog 05

Henson Pig Trail 2017 Gloucester blog 05

All of the painted artwork has now been finished and the next step, as the picture show was to give each pig a coat of varnish. The varnish helps to bring all the colours and painted elements together. 
The pictures show the pigs prior to wrapping and dispatch to Gloucester, in west England. Here they will be placed in to a trail in the City called 'Old Spots Sculpture Trail, and is based on an old Spots pig named Henson. The trail runs from June to August 2017 after which the pigs are auctioned off for charitable causes. Further information can be found here.

'Pigs may fly', 'Floating Floyd and 'Piggy Bank' pig sculptures destined for Gloucester 

'Piggy Bank' pig with gold and silver coins, ready for the Henson trail 2017

Front view of all three pigs for the Henson 2017 trail in Gloucester

Rears of each pig for the Henson 2017 'Old Spots Sculpture Trail'

'Pigs may fly' leading after being varnished

Henson Pig Trail 2017 Gloucester blog 04

Henson Pig Trail 2017 Gloucester blog 04

initial start on the 'Pigs may Fly' pig

first painted areas

The time had come to start work on the last pig, named as 'Pigs may Fly'. The design features various sizes of pigs, as silhouettes, and all done to the same basic design, flying upward through a blue sky and in to the night. The first stage was to draw out the design using a pencil, basically carving up the surface in to 'areas'. After that it is a simple task of then filling these areas with the predesignated flat colours as marked on the plan. However a single layer of paint is never enough so it is expected that two or more coats are to be needed. To help make the colours work I took time paint the sky around the silhouettes of the pigs so that they would take the colour better, rather that paint the pig colours over a sky colour.

Some pigs now painted

A few extra details and some fresh painting had also been done on the 'Floating Floyd' pig, namely the cords running between the large pigs and the power station on either side and a small rope coming of the little pig floating away.

'Floating Floyd' with details added

Henson Pig Trail 2017 Gloucester blog 03

Henson Pig Trail 2017 Gloucester blog 03

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.

'Piggy bank' with painting almost completed

Work has continued to finishing off the 'Piggy Bank' pig and tidying up details. The pink coat of paint, a premixed 'Reeves' paint colour has worked well straight out of the pot. Originally I had thought about mixing it using other paints but in this case it worked well, as did the 'metal' paints used on the coins, again from Reeves. The black lining is a Daler Rowney system 3 heavy pigment paint. Now I was able to return my attention to the 'Floating Floyd' pig, based on the 'Animals' cover by the band Pink Floyd. This uses more colours than the other pig and some are premixed paint, and some mixed paint by myself. The pigs/ designs give the impression that is is just an application of one simple colour. However it is quite common to have to paint several layers (brush painting) to get a dense enough colour but unfortunately sometimes the colours are not flat, even after several coats, in particular when using ones own mixed paint. So I have found myself having to slightly change colours, using purchased mixed paint to an approximate shade, to get over this problem but I don't think that it would detract to much from the intended design.

Large cartoon pig design closeup

Battersea power station on rear

'Floating Floyd' under progress with the finished 'Piggy bank' to rear

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