I originally completed this task as part of an epic collaboration attempt to do Neighborhood Tattoo lead by Ziggy C.. What follows is my section of the planned group write up. Sadly the project never fully materialized despite much hard work and months of planning on Ziggy's part. It was a very ambitious idea to have 15 players spell out "SF0.ORG Glastnost" and just couldn't be fully pulled together. Hopefully an update involving a full account of the failure will be up soon, but until then enjoy my neighborhood tattoos...

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YellowBear: I was very enthusiastic when Ziggy first contacted me about getting involved in this task. I don't know when he hatched the idea, but I was brought in on June 8th when the project idea was expanded.

Shortly after being contacted I began to sketch out some samples of designs for my letter 't' (at the end of Glastnost). I started with some designs of SF landmarks and quickly realized that I was unable to choose which one i liked the best. They seemed to work so well as a set. Ziggy's original request for a single letter quickly expanded in my mind into a way for me to personally commemorate a fantastic summer of tasking and my joy in finding SF0. I soon started to think of my piece as a set of t's, and as a love note to my city.

This is my original sketch of the concept


Once I decided to go with this concept I started to experiment with stencil making, which I had never really done before. It seemed clear that with the level of detail I wanted and to get maximum uniformity I should make separate stencils for the 't' and the different interior scenes. After laying out the designs in full size on some manila folders I used an exacto knife to carefully take out the many small pieces.

The 't'

My Favorite Sites Of The City (YellowBear)

The Palace of Fine Arts

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Coit Tower

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Cable Car #53

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The Golden Gate

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Sutro


Here are a couple of comparisons to show how the stencils stack up compared to my original designs


I don't have much experience with art in this medium so I needed to do a few experiments. After seeing her completion of 'A place you have never been' I consulted Bex about the virtues of using spray paint vs. dabbing acrylic. I was most concerned with avoiding dripping and making as little noise as possible during my covert artistification of the city.

I also used these experiments to find the best way to ensure that the 't' and the interior would match up as closely as possible. This turned out to be very difficult even under good lighting conditions with lots of time. I was concerned about how to do it well at night as quickly as possible. I tried doing the outline first and tried doing inside first. Needing to do two separate layers certainly added to the time required, since i needed to wait for the first portion to dry before laying down the other part.



As you can see in the larger version of this picture, the one on the left has the Cable Car misaligned. This seemed to happen more when I painted the interior first, rather than the outline first. Even being off a little on one side seemed to seriously misalign the entire design and started to get me a little worried. I was not willing to risk making an error on the final product that would haunt me & my neighborhood permanently.

To solve this problem I decided to pre-align the interiors to the 't' outline. I used a back light to get them perfectly lined up and then trimmed the upper left corner of the interior stencils to match the edge of the 't' outline stencil. When I was laying down the 't' outlines I put masking tape along the top and left edges of the stencil so that i could simply put the interior stencils into the exact same location and be confident that it would line up properly, even if i couldn't see at all.

I set out from my house at 2 am, went to a pre determined location in my neighborhood and went to work, hoping against hope that I would never need to explain to anyone that I got arested for vandalism for playing an internet game. Overall I don't think I could be more pleased with the finished results.

Palace of Fine Arts

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Coit Tower

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Cable Car #53

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Golden Gage Bridge

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The Final Results!


Thanks so much for putting this all together, Ziggy! I had a blast.
-YellowBear
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I felt really really guilty going about doing this, I just continually told myself that all I was doing was making a boring little patch of concrete more beautiful and interesting.

Although the grand plan didn't work out, I would have never been motivated to do this task on my own and I am really glad that I did. I put a lot of love and sf pride into them and in the end I feel like i've been left a permanent heart warming reminder of an amazing summer! Thanks to everyone who I have had the pleasure of meeting & tasking with over the last 6 months!!