The Making of Momentum
When I was approached about designing a mural for the basketball court at Main Street Park, I was SO excited! Not only was this going to be my first court mural, but I was getting the opportunity to contribute something to a site that has been important to its community for a very long time. The original park began through the work of Peggy and Ed Hines, who purchased the lot of an old shoe factory and created a place for the children living in Suwanee’s community on “the hill” to play. After Ed passed away, Peggy approached the City with a hope to collaborate and maintain it as a park.
A lot of people care about this park and I heard a LOT of different ideas about what this mural could be. As a designer, my usual goal is to listen and turn somebody else’s vision into something real. But after trying out several directions, something just wasn’t clicking, and I was losing that initial excitement. I realized I was treating this like a design project when it was really meant to be an art project.
I took my designer hat off and asked Annabel the Artist what she would put here if it could be ANYTHING. My brain immediately thought of my scanner, and the series of watercolor paintings that I made a few years ago with it (i.e. Scanography Self-Portrait, 3 Bottles, and Sun Drop).
In this process, I put an object on my trusty photo scanner and move it around while the scanner runs, making the scanned image look stretched and warped. Then I would paint that image. Using a teeny tiny brush and painting the teeny tiny details where the refracted light and created intricate and organic rainbow waves has always been my favorite part. I love getting my face super close to the paper for this. Recalling that made me think of how awesome it would be to see those details on a large scale. I imagined people standing on them, making up games around them, maybe wondering what they were looking at. The excitement came back! That was the kind of thing I wanted to make.
An agreeable subject for the scan was pretty easy to select. A basketball is probably the most predictable thing you put on a basketball court, which is exactly why it was perfect for what I was about to do to it! I figured that no matter how crazy it looked from this process, people should be able to decipher what it is fairly quickly.
I tested scanning different basketballs and nets at first, since I have always used real objects, but decided creating a flat illustration of a basketball would be best to help limit the color palette for the painters. I added “SUWANEE” wrapping around it (resembling a professional basketball logo), with “SUW” on one side and “ANEE” on the other.
Then I took about 300 scans of this printed-out ball illustration. Each time, I would try to twitch, pull, push and turn the paper differently while the scanner head moved, trying to create a shape that felt like forward motion, as if the ball was being thrown.
Getting the right “vibe” of warp was actually pretty tricky. A lot of them looked deflated or melted. Sometimes one section of the ball would be perfect, but another part was distracting or illegible. Since every scan was completely unique (and photoshop is not of any help in piecing something like this together), I just had to keep going until I finally had the right mixture of motion, balance, color distortion, and legibility. Momentum eventually showed itself. Once approved, I traced and simplified the scan digitally, making it translatable for painting.
![BASKETBALL COURT MURAL[9] 2.PNG](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/65e242f712a8366342f6963e/1787068704289-RCNB6DXAQFZTRJ748ZW0/BASKETBALL+COURT+MURAL%5B9%5D+2.PNG)
We partnered with Art in the Paint, a nonprofit that brings art and athletics together through painted courts and community spaces. The crew told me this was one of the more detailed murals they had done on a court, so I came out daily to answer color questions, bring gridded reference sheets and help wherever I could. We held a community paint day for folks in the area to come out and lay some paint on the court themselves. It was hot as Georgia in the summer, but had a great turnout!
Once the crew finished the larger areas, I came back for four full days to paint my signature, the warped “SUWANEE” lettering, and touch up the rest of those little colorful details that are my pride of the piece. This was (as I dreamt) my favorite part, the tiny shapes I used to paint with my face inches away from the paper were now big enough to stand on! I felt like a little bug crawling around on my painting.
I also carried the scanner idea onto the new backboards. This time I scanned the colorful bubbles from Suwanee’s logo and left the image raw for texture instead of tracing it. I feel this pop of color ties everything together, top to bottom, without just doing more basketball on the backboards.
When the City held a ribbon cutting for the finished park, I got to say a few words about the piece. Since then, I have been so happy to hear such positive feedback from the community.
The title Momentum reflects more than just the movement of the ball. The reason this court exists because people in this community created momentum here decades ago. The Hines family got it moving, the community cared for it, and this renovation and mural is another way the City hopes to keep that going!
