Yorkshire Falafel

During the pandemic, my wife and I opened a shop in Hebden Bridge: BROUG’s homeware & gifts. In the three years we had this shop, we became part of the shopowners ecosystem in this special town in the Yorkshire hills. One of the many interesting people I met was a guy who made fresh humous on the street for years. He had a small fold-out table, gas stove etc. Recently, he’s finally found a good shop space. As a gesture, I offered to make him a mural next to his shop front door to get maximum attention from passers-by.

How I made it:

If I had taken a completely traditional approach, I would have designed it so that there would be four quarter stars on the corners of the composition. However, I wanted it to look more random and slightly rotated, more like a snapshot of a bigger composition.

I drew a pattern on my computer and used a rectangle of the same proportions as the piece of plywood, to choose a part of the pattern. After this I measured where, along the four edges, lines from the composition reached. This I then marked out in pencil on the plywood, connected lines across the plywood and slowly built up the composition. It’s quite a fuss to do it. I could have used a projector but that requires a lot of accuracy in projection; distortion is almost impossible to avoid. Below are some photos of the design phases.

After all the lines were drawn in pencil, I used masking tape to make the pattern appear and more masking tape to identify shapes within the lines.

Jim’s Falafel uses red and pink in his branding so I kept those colours.