Oklahoma City, OK
Greetings from OKC. We passed through Oklahoma City the previous year on our Route 66 trip. We were looking for a wall to paint a quick mural for an unrelated project and met Ryan Faught who gave us permission to paint on his building in Midtown. Ryan spent a lot of time traveling on his sailboat, so we had an instant nomadic travel connection. We passed through OKC again this year en route to our next mural in Knoxville, TN. As a result, we wanted to try to do a Greetings from OKC mural on the same building since we never painted in Oklahoma yet. After a quick and easy approval from the Midtown Renaissance, we planned to do an abbreviated "OKC" large letter mural due to the limited time we had.
While in town, we also celebrated our 3 year anniversary with a day off at a hotel and got some sushi, which we haven't had since our recent trip to Tokyo. We had the chance to catch up with Lisa's long time friend, Shaina and had some great pizza at Empire Slice House in the Plaza District (New Yorker approved!)
On top of painting the mural in OKC, we finally got solar panels installed while in town! We're still wondering why it took us two years to get solar. We highly recommend it for anyone who does as much boondocking/dry camping as we do. Our setup included two 100W Renogy panels and a 400W inverter to keep our house batteries charged throughout the day. This was certainly a game changer for us.
We had no idea what to expect when it came to weather but it was definitely cold enough that we needed to wear a beanie. Also, we were pretty nervous when a storm came around, and we started hearing the tornado sirens. It’s one of the things that we are pretty nervous about on the road as we don’t have brick and mortar shelter and Honeybear wouldn’t fair too well through high winds. Luckily, it passed without any issues, and we go back to painting.
Special thanks to Bombing Science for their support of our project and shipping spray paint caps (especially stencil caps) to test out along with along other goodies. While the stencil caps have been around for a while, Victor never really tried messing with them too much until Dcypher showed me the proper way to use them with gray dots in Los Angeles for the recent project with Airbnb. They really helped with the detail in the imagery without having to use brush. Coming from a background of doing lettering and more graphic imagery, he’s still new to the photo realism techniques!
One of our favorite people we met briefly was Kris Kanaly who runs the Plaza Walls project. Originally, they offered some of their wall space for our project which we greatly appreciated. They invite artists from all over the world and rotate the wall art yearly. Therefore, we felt that our mural would be better off in a more permanent location since it acts as a landmark. However, we were very excited about the Plaza Walls project and happy to see their public art initiative. Since we’ve been there, we have been watching the project grow larger by the year. Congrats Kris!
We hope that we can create murals all along Route 66 in our project. We have already one in Chicago at the beginning and Santa Monica at the end. Update: We’ve also added a new mural in Albuquerque recently. It would be the perfect Route 66 road trip checklist to make this happen in all the states that the old highway crosses through.
Thank you to the OKC Thunder for their support and making this one possible! Also thanks to Cayla from the Plaza District for sharing some ideas for content. This was a fun project with the community Oklahoma City.
Letter Guide:
O — Devon Tower, Crystal Bridge & Route 66 Sign
K — Gates of Time, Skydance Bridge
C — Midtown Plaza Court Sign, Rumble OKC Thunder Mascot
Year: 2017
Mural Size: 12'H x 19'W
Location: 320 NW 11th St. Oklahoma City, OK 73103