Newsletter
How Overall Murals Creates Eye-Catching Outdoor Art for Apple, Ray-Ban, Nike and More
The art of the mural is evolving with advances in paint technology
Spend time walking in cities like New York, Chicago, Seattle, Boston, Austin and Atlanta, and chances are you will encounter a work of art created by Overall Murals for Apple, Nike, Sony and other brands. Co-founded by Angel Saemai and Dmitry Pankov, a married couple, in 2010, the Brooklyn-based company is one of the world’s premiere providers of outdoor murals.
Here, Saemai, who began her career in advertising, and Pankov, a trained artist, discuss projects for the Museum of Modern Art, Ray-Ban and Sephora, and they reveal how advances in paint technology have led to innovations in their field.
MUSE: What would you say to brands that are interested in murals but have yet to explore hand-painted art?
Angel Saemai: Coca-Cola has been doing it for a hundred years, and that’s one of our biggest clients.
Dmitry Pankov: It definitely takes longer [than creating digital art], and it’s more expensive—the paints and the labor. But then you have advantages. You have the spectacle. You have the progression timeline when people witness the process of creation.
Angel Saemai: We have an in-house capture content team. A lot of clients like to buy videos along with the mural in order to capture the spectacle that Dmitry mentioned. And since it is a spectacle, it is more memorable than other forms of advertising. When people see it in process, or even the finished product, they remember it. It’s more ingrained in their minds. [Overall Murals posts making-of content on Instagram and TikTok.]
You recently painted an impressive reproduction of Claude Monet’s “Water Lilies” on a wall in Williamsburg to promote the Museum of Modern Art. What are the challenges in creating a mural based on a masterpiece?
Dmitry Pankov: It’s always difficult to paint other artists’ art because each stroke represents the expression of individuality, and it’s hard to follow. But I think [our artists] did pretty good. The colors were pretty close to the original pigment he used. We chose two of our best high-level painters to work together. Typically, for a wall that size, we might have four to six painters. But [for this project] we only had two, so they could match each other and stay with the strategy.
View this post on Instagram
You also created a Faces of Music-themed mural for Sephora in Los Angeles featuring portraits of Chappell Roan, Becky G and Victoria Monét. Painting accurate portraits is a real skill.
Dmitry Pankov: There’s a lot of people who are talented and good at copying images, but you still have to get to that level of portrait painting. You still have to know anatomy, the physics of light.
Angel Saemai: There’s a lot of prep work that goes into it. We do a majority of the production in-house first, which is mixing the colors and creating patterns before the painters get to the wall. We then use those patterns to transfer the image onto the wall. The drawing is a really important part of the process.
Are you always trying to find new ways to innovate?
Angel Saemai: Definitely. We love the traditional method of hand painting, and we think that in itself is super impactful. But with technology, new paints are developing, and we like to try everything. More clients are coming to us with special requests. We recently did a lenticular mural for Ray-Ban. That particular mural is a special build-out, where you can see two [different eyeglass frames] on one face, depending on your physical POV. We’re getting more RFPs that are asking for something in addition to the painting. So, we’ll bring another layer to it. We did a water-activated campaign for Ore-Ida frozen French fries in Seattle. It took a lot of experimentation and research and development to get there. We put this special layer of paint over the copy so it wouldn’t be unveiled until water hit it. So, if it started raining, you would see the message.
What skills do artists need to paint murals for your company?
Angel Saemai: Skill is definitely part of it but also grit, resilience, reliability and all that. They’re working in all sorts of conditions outside, whether it’s super hot or super cold. They have to be on their feet for 10 to 12 hour days. So, we’re looking for people who have that passion—and they’re scrappy, and willing to fight for what they’re doing every day. Physical strength is important, too.
Here in New York, there has been a lot of new development, and muralists are losing access to the buildings that have traditionally been their canvases. Is that an issue for you in NYC, or other cities you work in?
Angel Saemai: It’s a worry but not a huge worry. It happens—a new development goes in, and your wall gets covered, the canvas gets covered, or the building gets knocked down for something new. But we’ve built walls on new buildings, too. We have a wall on The William Vale hotel [in Williamsburg]. There wasn’t a wall there. It was just columns with open spaces. And then we decided to build the structure and paint it. If we wanted to, we could probably paint on billboard structures as well. We can paint anywhere.
