exterior · 2021
West High Panther
The challenge
A school mascot is something the whole building already has an opinion about. It had to look like the panther the students already know, on white brick, in an alley people walk through rather than stand back from.
Donated. West High got the wall in Panther Alley painted at no charge, and the mascot was the obvious subject.
The panther is black on white brick with red behind it, and the eyes are the only place that red appears twice. Painting dark on light is the harder direction, because every correction shows and white brick does not forgive a soft edge.
It sits in an alley, so nobody sees it from a distance. That set the scale: a head large enough to fill the view from ten feet away, rather than a whole animal that would only resolve from a vantage point the space does not have.
