One day while sitting around in one of the lounges on my hall, I found a record with a great cover on a bookshelf. My hall has a long tradition of painting murals on the walls (there are only a few blank spots left, it's the most "muraled" hall in the dorm), and I knew I wanted to paint one before I graduated. So, I took this album cover as my guide, and scanned it into a computer. Then I used the gimp to manipulate the scanned in image to include a bunch of in-jokes relating to the hall. To view larger images of the cover and the altered version, click on the pictures. Here's a small list of changes:
- The record is a 31 3/37 "leet" play record (if you don't know haxxor, 3=e, 1=l, 7=t, so 31337=eleet [sic], and leet is a short form of that).
- It's now the "Third East Symphony Orchestra, Conductor James E. Tetazoo" (Third East is the hall I lived on, James E. Tetazoo is the collective pseudonym for the hall [Tetazoo itself an acronym for Third East Traveling Animal ZOO]).
- "Whipper" from the RCA logo has been replaced by a squanch (Tetazoo's mascot).
- "RCA Victor" is now "MIT Victim" (maybe not the best word choice, but it was the right number of letters).
- "Red Seal Records" is now "Red Spling Records" (spling is a word I like that I sort of made up).
- A plane is flying into the sultan's palace (I decided not to do this in the mural after 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan).
- It's barely visible at this resolution, but one of the small green shrubs is now a sheep (see this).
- In the final (on the wall) version, Ali Baba (the guy on the record, a character from Arabian Nights, if you didn't know) has his eyes fixed on the fire alarm box that is on the wall, which is in the sky area, some where above the red and yellow box.
I painted the mural in about 20 straight hours (no sleep) after finals in the spring term of my freshman year (May 2002). I used acrylics, and a lot of masking tape and pencil, especially on the letters. Interestingly, I found the more organic script letters easier to draw and paint than the sans-serif letters. Since then, the wall that the mural has been on has been abused a bit, but that is to be expected with the kind of stuff that goes on in the hallway.
