Painted Mural, Digital Art
"Do you paint walls?"
Jaafar asked me at a cafe we both happened to be at. I had been working on some other design projects at the time. Turns out he was opening a new Middle Eastern bagel shop in the University District and was looking for someone to design and paint an art installment. I had never professionally made any physical deliverables to this scale for anyone, but I was excited to try.
About Toasted
Toasted. Bagels and Coffee, owned by Jaafar Altameemi & Murat Akyuz, is a Middle Eastern Bagel shop introducing Seattle to gourmet bagel sandwiches, with the hopes of solving some of the restaurant industry’s biggest problems, including waste, efficiency and lack of technology integration.
Deliverables
(University District) Designs for Two Arches, a focal point of the dining area. Hand-painted, Custom Mosaic design
(Bellevue) Two signs with the restaurants name, with signature graphic floral. Hand-Painted text and graphic, Custom Designed
(South Lake Union) 23 x 4 ft. Wall Mural, design incorporating landmarks and signature elements of the Toasted. aesthetic - plants and turkish coffee pour
Softwares Used
The third and final location was by far the biggest and most complex design thus far. The wall was 23 x 4 feet and they wanted the mural to fill the entire area. The basis for the design is a Toasted. signature slogan "Mediterranean taste, Seattle's Heart" which reflects the essence of both the bagels and the personal stories behind this artwork. Jaafar and Murat’s journey began at the University of Washington in Seattle, where their shared backgrounds from Iraq, Egypt, and Turkey came together. This piece highlights key landmarks from their respective pasts, incorporating Toasted.'s signature colors and a Turkish coffee pour—a tribute to the design style of their restaurants.
Medium: I used mid-quality acrylic paint on standard white wall paint, and then finished with a polyurethane sealant. because the components are relatively small and detailed and organic, I did everything freehand with paint brushes, as opposed to rollers or taping.
Color Mixing: The most time consuming part of using acrylics was the color mixing and matching, which I did all by hand with a palette knife and a set of 24 colors. I learned to mix more than I needed because color matching is so difficult after the fact. A benefit of the design is it is mostly discrete color blocks, so I essentially color-by-numbers, rather than shading or blending colors on the wall.
Balance: I also learned about visual balance and cohesion, both in shapes and complexity, and in color. The original intent was to have the Washington and Middle Eastern sides be predominantly blue and yellow respectively but some tweaks were needed and details added were needed, as elements were washed out when the colors adjacent were too similar.
For the second location, they gave me a lot of free reign over the design. They only asked that the name was as big as possible. I mocked up about 6 designs on Procreate, trying to match their established style and color schemes. The final design they picked was simple, color-blocked yellow, with their signature floral design overflowing from one sign to the other. I then moved to Figma to digitally mock up the design in HD, making sure to use the exact fonts and colors they had in their original logo.
Alternative Options
Medium: I got to employ different painting techniques this time around. We went with Medium-Density Fiberboard (MDF), which requires a primer and sealant as it can be too absorbent of paint without it. Even though this was my first time using with the medium, I wanted to make the quality and longevity was not sacrificed.
Typeface is important to get right. The differences between two fonts are so subtle and the precision, evenness, and size can make or break if text looks professional. For the larger text, I taped and measured meticulously to make sure it was straight, and then touched it up by hand.
June 2024
Designed on Procreate, and edited with Illustrator. I start by coming up with at least three different designs, each hitting different parts of the inspiration pictures. Murat and Jafaar liked geometric mosaic and floral patterns, with the distinct colors of Toasted. They wanted colorful, eye catching patterns for the arches, because they had many social media goals for the Toasted aesthetic.
I completed the design digitally and then used a projector, which made sure the geometric pattern was perfectly even. Then I traced the entire design with pencil, taped the edges, light fixtures and outlets and painted. I used acrylic wall paint and a sealant coating after 2 weeks of curing. With the design being so repetitive and geometric, the projector made it easy for me to execute it without measuring.
Maddie Chan