The Size Of Snails

 Right , well recently I've been playing around with the size of snails , snails are small, they range from a centimetre in circumference to about the size of a human fist .I decided to experiment with size and thought of ways of taking a snail out of its natural habitat and putting it in a random situation on a much larger scale. Large scale snail I call it. Basically I drew a cartoon character version of a snail and then made some adjustments to change it to stencil form. I cut out this firs stencil and got ahold of an overhead projector.

I knew that if I found a big canvas i.e the side of a house at night that I could do some pretty cool things with this idea. Here's my first large scale snail projected on the side of a two story house. It might be hard to see the magnitude from the picture , but my neighbours were impressed as they drove past this big snail.

The projector was mounted in the most awkward position and the mirror was bent. It took a long time to rig up the first one but got easier as I got more pleasing results.

I also projected the snail onto the sides of cars to add a humerus effect , through the differences of fast and slow . The snail here looks like some of those expensive vinyl paint jobs that you find on boy racers vehicles , but the fact that its a snail defeats the purpose of having it really.

This is the same snail projected onto my friends garage because he was interested to see what I was shiting on about and driving around with  a projector in the boot of my car for. This image is probably my favourite of the first stencil because it is one of the clearest , and you can truly see the scale of the work. I see this as a stepping stone in my work as this is like a sprayed piece of street art yet it isn't at all harmful and can be taken down after a picture is taken. Most street artists only want the picture anyway as street art has a very short life span in some cases.

This art is easily reversed , It's like two picture in one ! I was pleased to figure out that not only did i have one snail but I also had his exact reverse image .. happy days.

The French actually eat snails, pretty disgusting , well it is now after I've taken a few of them into captivity and seen how they live , they're filthy little things.. eat my art derived from the original idea of Manger mon art the French translation.

I really liked being able to do such detail in this snails face , something I didn't think possible, in my chosen media. It's all a learning process and hopefully I can excel  from here.

Here you can see how big these actually are , two stories of art from a tiny a4 size sheet , It's really enjoyable to see it take shape.

I became aware that colour was absent and pondered on the possibility of making these stencils coloured. I found a sheet lying in my room of this translucent coloured material which I thought might work , I proceeded to cut and stick different colours to new stencils and these were my results. 

I thought this was a weak stencil compared to the rest , there was another one which was perhaps my favourite design but it didn't appear on the wall as I would have wished , I mean it was just a blur .. painful.

Again here I used the idea for the car and was pleased to see that colour really added to the design. The purely white stencil had its advantages and disadvantages , as well as the coloured one.