I don’t know if this is the correct terminology for this – I looked it up and it seems to be contradicting across the board – but do you know stores in certain cities/countries have these rugged metal gates you roll up and down to open or close the establishment? Same concept as the door of a storage unit. Well, I don’t know if this is the publicly accepted name for it, but from what I saw, I liked “roller shutter” best, so that’s the name for the rest of this blog.

At the end of my Colombia trip for my grandma’s epic 80th birthday party, my brother asked my artistic cousin Jhonathan for help in blowing up the design of his new fast food joint logo, and painting it over the roller shutters of the place. He also asked for some additional artwork on the walls that reflected the available menu items. Since this was near the end of our stays (as Jhonathan lives in Bogota and my family is in another city named Santa Marta), Jhonathan enlisted my help to try and finish quicker – or quite honestly, just finish on time.

The main design for the restaurant named “El Chamo” (a Venezuelan slang word similar to ‘dude’), is this trippy casual guy, minding his own business but also letting everyone know there’s awesome food including shawarma at this place. But before we got to him, we started off “easy” by drawing and painting stuff like chicken wings, bowls of soup, arepas, wraps, eating utensils, etc. on the walls all around the building.

As you can see, the wall they were painted on had a thick corrugation, so these weren’t easy to paint – and we didn’t have great brushes either. But creative people shine when they have to make do with what they have, so we did! We also got help from our other artsy cousins Lizette & Karen, and we got through most of the walls in a few hours.

But now, the big piece. The Chamo logo on the super-mega-corrugated, not-a-single-flat-spot roller stunter… which made it literally the roller coaster of all painting experiences. That’s why I named this “roller brusher stutter,” because not a single stoke went by without a little bump or slide. It was challenging and we had to go slow because if we went too fast we could distort the image a little too much, and so this was way more time consuming than doing the whole wall. Without any further ado, here’s live and in color, El Chamo himself!

If you’re like me, you’re also horribly focused on the fact that that zipper looks a little odd. I know. Throw us a bone. It was really hard to draw on that surface and fixing it wasn’t much of an option. Also, look at that skyline! I can’t put into words how frustrating that was to draw/paint. Did I mention we actually had to do another Chamo guy on another of the roller shutters? Oh yeah…

This one was just half of the body because it was a half gate, so I guess a little easier, but still. Doing this twice? I don’t wish it on an enemy…

After all was said and done, my brother was very happy with the end result and my cousin and I were very proud of our work. He did the bulk of the hard parts drawing almost everything in pencil, and I mostly followed his outline with the paintbrush, so I did have that to my advantage. But I did do some drawing of my own

Here we are, proud artists and our work!