Art Alley

Art Alley is an alleyway in Rapid City, SD. It began as a place for artists to paint or display their artwork. It was basically an outdoor gallery space that is constantly changing. There were/are mounted paintings, graffiti (positive), murals, wheat pasted drawings and sketches as well as sculptures on the walls, dumpsters and hanging from the power lines. This may be one of the most interesting areas to go hang out in Rapid City. It certainly was one of the most common areas to get senior pictures taken.

One of the fascinations with Art Alley is that it keeps changing.  You art gets painted over and you paint over other peoples work.  Your work falls down and the remains get used in another work.  The thing that I loved about trains was how they were always moving.  Art Alley is similar in the fact that it is always changing.

This creative space was quite controversial my senior year of highs school.  The city ended up taking control.  It was no longer the same community ran space as it was before.  There were some sad aspects to the city's new control.  But some of the positives included paving the road, having concerts, a free place to display positive artwork, and a community that is heavily influenced by art that is changing on a daily basis.

 Images from Awardspace.com

Some of my photographs of Art Alley.

Art Alley's MySpace 

Pinterest

Here is some of my collected graffiti inspiration from Pinterest.com.  I am beginning to like the idea of stencils. 

This is a great website.  If you want an invite post your email address as a comment and be sure to follow me : )

Face

I think that my favorite aspect of this work is the cartoon face and the varieties of line quality.  There is not a huge variety of line width, however I do think that there is enough variety to make the image interesting.  I also like the subtle pink bubbles in the background.  I guess everything has a minimalistic feel. 

42

I love that this artist's name is 42. I am curious to know what it represents.  I think that my tag would be somehting like ff or maybe a cool name like an old nickname or something...I guess I don't really know. 

I also like the background bubble shapes, shadow, and the simplicity of the lettering.

Typefaces

Though I would not use the premade typefaces on a project (at least not the one I am currently working on, maybe a quick flier for a concert, maybe not).  However, I think that there are a couple great letters and I have used the bottom A and the top R.  I also like the use of arrows.

Everfresh

Everfresh: Blackbook
This books is a documentary of the Everfresh studio in Melbourne, Australia.  I really like that the book shows the art that these guys sell.  It is neat that they can make a living being graffiti artists.

colorful cartoons

I took these in Seattle, WA

I love the color and the cute cartoon characters.  I like that there are several colors used together.  

The lines making the text 3-d are then only part that is consistent or has solid tones.