No Job Too Small!

Recently we were contacted by the Intrepid Museum in New York City.  For those not familiar with the Intrepid, it's a decommissioned aircraft carrier permanently ported in New York.  It's an Essex Class ship, which were the largest carriers in the fleet.  The Intrepid has a flight deck that is NINE football fields in length!

Now, you'd think with structure that ABSOLUTELY GINORMOUS, it would have no problem getting noticed.  But this is New York City, and you gotta go the extra mile if you want to make your mark here.  Particularly if you're not allowed to fire your 1000 round per minute 50 caliber machine guns.

So the museum contacted Silver Hill Atelier to see about getting the name "Intrepid" painted on the stern of the ship - the part of the ship that is visible to thousands of drivers and passerbyes on the West Side Highway.

"We're supposed to dangle 50' over the Hudson River, and paint the word 'Intrepid?  Sure.  No problem..."

For a step by step on how we did it, click below to keep reading...

The first step for a project like this is planning in the studio.  We were given a digital file of the logo, and we blew this file up to full 1:1, and printed it out on our large format digital printer.  This printed version on paper would serve as our template / layout for the project.

The next step was planning for safety.  Getting to the spot where they wanted the logo would require a special hanging scaffold platform setup.  We used a company we have worked with before - Colgate Scaffold.  These guys scaffold everything in New York City.

Unfortunately, as the Stern of the ship curves outward, the hanging platform would have to be installed in place prior to our getting on it.  That meant we would have to rappell down to the platform to even START painting.  Great!  Well, luckily our crew, including the owner of Silver Hill, Norvel, are all adventurous types, and already had the mountineering  skills to get to the platform.  That's right.  Mountineering.  We'll look for it on your resume.

The day of the job, we arrived at the ship, and began by laying out the logo on the deck.  CLICK THUMBNAILS FOR ENLARGED VIEWS!

Each of the letters was printed individually so that we could get the ideal spacing accurate to the surface of the ship.

After laying out the letters, and taping them together in a pleasing manner, it was time to go over the edge of the ship.

Norvel volunteered to go over first, after reassuring the crew, "Look, I got us into this thing, but I promise I'll get us out too!"

So Over the Edge he went!

I think Michael followed him down...

Once everyone had gotten down to the hanging platform, the relatively easy job of painting the logo began.

The first step was to tape the logo into place.  You know when you're hanging a painting on the wall at home, and you have your wife step back and tell you if it's level and centered?  We had a guy a quarter mile away doing the same thing for us.   And of course we double-checked things through measurements and our trusty speed level!

The next step was to "pounce" the design onto the ship.  Back in the studio, we had taken the digital printout of the logo, and "pounced" along the outlines of the letters.  To pounce something, your use a pounce wheel.  A pounce wheel looks a lot like a circular pizza cutting blade, but much smaller, on the end of a hand-held instrument that looks a little like a dentist's tools look.  It creates small little perforations in the paper.  Then, when you are at the site, and the paper is taped up to the ship as shown in the picture above, you take chalk dust and rub it along the perforated areas of the paper.  The chalk travels through the tiny perforations, and transfers a line drawing directly onto the underlying surface, in this case, the ship.

After pouncing the logo, we peeled away the digital print to reveal the transferred white line drawing underneath.

The next step was to mask the outlines of the letters with blue tape to prepare for painting.

Once the letters were taped, you can imagine that the actual painting part was the easiest part of the whole business!

Then we just had to wait for the paint to dry, and then pull the tape off.

A Job Well Done....

And a happy crew - another adventure in the arts!