Check out the hand-painted wall ads of E3

[midian182]

With another E3 behind us, game fans are now talking about how 2017 stacked up against previous years’ events. Whether it was better or worse is open for debate, but one element of E3 that’s always a highlight are the pictures on the walls of LA’s Hotel Figueroa.

You’ve probably seen the iconic images before. They’ve featured titles such as GTA V, Skyrim, Max Payne 3, Gwent, Star Wars: Battlefront II, and many more. But, as noted by Kotaku’s Luke Plunkett, many people don’t realize that they’re painted by hand.

Painting ads on the side of the Figueroa is a practice that’s been going on for decades. In recent years it’s been undertaken by a company called Walldogs, which specializes in giant, hand-painted advertisements.

There was a time when LA was populated with companies that worked on massive, hand-painted ads like these, but in the early 1990s the industry started changing over to vinyl computer-printed billboards, which are easier to produce and maintain, and help keep advertising uniform across the country.

Walldogs owner Riley Forsythe admits there are only a handful of firms around today that still hand-paint walls. He says the risk of large pieces of vinyl blowing down, the huge buildings being unable to accommodate a frame, and the appeal of watching people paint keeps his company and others like it in business.

Check out the 2014 Bloomberg interview with Forsythe below, which shows how a project moves from the initial stages to a full-sized wall painting.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/69823-check-out-hand-painted-wall-ads-e3.html

 

[Uncle Al]

No real surprise here; there are still a number of hand painted ads, wall murals and the like. They do hold up better but when a company makes that kind of investment they should be looking at a lifetime of the wall to be years, perhaps even decades. It's certainly NOT a cheap investment!

 

[mailpup]

The giant murals are visible from the 110 (Harbor) Freeway in downtown Los Angeles so location is a factor. Although undoubtably expensive to produce, they are potentially seen by thousands every day. Evidently it is a worthwhile effort as it has been going on for years, as the article says.

 

[Adhmuz]

No real surprise here; there are still a number of hand painted ads, wall murals and the like. They do hold up better but when a company makes that kind of investment they should be looking at a lifetime of the wall to be years, perhaps even decades. It's certainly NOT a cheap investment!

Decades? Even years is a vast over estimation of how long the ads stay on the Figueroa Hotel, I'd peg that ad space at 6 months tops before it gets repainted into something else. A whole lot of Rockstar games have been painted on that wall over the years, movies, sporting events, ect. And this is seemingly all in the last 10 years alone.