From January of 2010 till December 2010 I lived in Brooklyn, NY while I was conducting post-doctoral research at Columbia University in Manhattan. I lived in an apartment at 537 Clinton Ave in the Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn which lies east of Fort Greene and west of Bedford-Stuyvesant.
Although certainly not exclusive to Clinton Hill, it did seem as though the neighborhood had a lot of graffiti murals — especially heading east along Fulton St toward Bed-Stuy. Reflecting back on it now it seems as though that was a characteristic of the neighborhood's pwn style, as I do not really remember seeing murals in Park Slope, Fort Greene, DUMBO, Bensonhurst, or other sections of Brooklyn I've been to.
Well, it turns out Mike Williams, lead singer of EHG, also lived in this neighborhood at one time, so along those lines I thought it would be an interesting exercise in Photoshop to try recreate the Clinton Hill-style graffiti mural as a poster for an EHG gig.
My building (Clinton Hall on Clinton Ave. in Clinton Hill), as well as many, many others in my old neighborhood, was made from bricks, and it would seem impossible for me to conjure up an image of graffiti that wasn't spray painted over a brick surface, therefore, like peanut butter and jelly, the two just go together. So I started with a brick image as the background for my image. However, in order to generate the "spray paint on a surface" optic I was going for I had to first generate what is known as a "displacement map" in photoshop — something that was completely unfamiliar with prior to this project. In short, to generate the distortion map, I had to take the brick background, remove the color and optimize the contrast, then save it to a separate psd file to be imported later as a template for a distortion of the image.
For the text, I went with a script type font known as "master of comics" for the EYEHATEGOD piece, then used 2 other "graffiti" themed fonts for the date and venue. "El Angel Quebrado" translates to "broken angel" in spanish which is a nod to the Broken Angel House that used to stand at 4 Downing St. I went with a bright blue to pink gradient for the font color since I wanted some "light," not drab, looking graffiti. Although not perfect, I like the way this came out because even though this was my first time trying this, I think I did accomplish the style and optic effect I was looking for, and I'm only going to get better at it from here. This piece was definitely a step up in skill requirements from anything else I had even attempted up until this point, so as with anything else, if you want to get better, you better get comfortable with being uncomfortable.
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