Huatoki Plaza

Huatoki Plaza was a retail building that was removed to expose the covered stream beneath it. New Plymouth made a reasonably boring urban space for people to ignore. One day, an artist put up a paste-up image of a face to try to make it better. It probably did because these days, the Plaza has several artists' work on various buildings that face it. I've sketched one of the buildings a few times and currently has artwork by Phil 'Suspect' Jones. His studio is actually in the Plaza and his murals are all around town.

Colourize Project: Huatoki Street Art

Huatoki Plaza, where the recently flooded stream flows, has several major wall areas in or near it. Some of the artworks last a while and other walls seem to rotate more frequently. This is part of my Colorize Project so these are old sketches. The 2015 sketch looks pretty much the same where the 2013 wall has been painted over.

SketchCrawl 50

New Plymouth seems to have a reasonable amount of public art around the place. For this sketchcrawl, we tried to have a theme of the art that is around but to also try to show it in it's context. Try to visually describe where it is. I also brought some paints out this weekend. I'm a bit of a watercolour noob, but it turned out okay. I did a second quick one with a pen from the other direction.

The alley that I was in is on the left of this photo:

James Lane

This tall and thin building forms half of James Lane and two sides have street art on it. You can see a biplane on top and the bottom has a intricately painted wooden fence alley scene. I thought that the alley scene is a pretty good job but a friend said that maybe the artists did too good of a job. The fact that it's painted very well may give it a bit of resistance to being painted over with something new and prevent the natural image rotation that usually comes with urban art. Of course, the buildings making up the lane might not be that earthquake safe. If they end up needing replacement, it sort of makes the artwork time limit argument irrelevant. It's unlikely that any new building will have wall space put aside for spray cans. 

(Here's roughly the same scene, but from a slightly different angle done in 2012. Spot the differences between these two pictures.)