HEAVY HANDED
A WORLD OF BURGER LOVE
Client: Heavy Handed
Project : Create show-stopping murals for new restaurant franchise.
Description : It’s not often the perfect client exists, but I can truly say the fellas at Heavy Handed are not only some of the coolest people I have ever had the pleasure of working with, but they have given me the gift and freedom to absolutely go nuts for their restaurants. So far I have painted every square inch of free space at 3 of their highly successful restaurants. It all started in Santa Monica, with a unique outdoor wall space, in which we really wanted to make a big visual impact on Main street.
They wanted something that gave the space a wow factor while also having some meaning to their business journey. They started making burgers as a pop-up tent during covid, and after some time started with a big yellow food truck, and a year later this was their first brick and mortar. I came up with the idea that as an evolution of their burger franchise in the future, maybe they built a homemade robot that they drove around. They loved the idea, and said, can he be playing with the food truck. I said of course! I also said we can give the robot tattoos for all the significant details as to your business history. Like the GPS of their first popup or the logo of the Brig, a bar they parked their truck for weekends.
The mural was a huge hit, literally, and “HEAVY” the robot was born. As they kept opening restaurants, we treated each as a new adventure for HEAVY in a psychedelic burger world.
HEAVY HANDED #2 STUDIO CITY
For the second restaurant, It was all systems go. Now that Heavy was an established character for the brand, we wanted to explore a world in which he lived, a magical burger wonderland, with rivers of beer, burgermushrooms, a butter-fry, hot fudge springs and ice cream mountains.
There was a lot of area to cover inside and outside the restaurant, including the bathrooms, which was a first for me to paint a bathroom. But when you think about creating an unique experience, a bathroom can be a totally fun and immersive place to do something new and exciting. And in this case, for the largest restroom, I thought making it look like the inside of a submarine, underneath the colorful rivers of the burger wonderland. For the other bathroom, we thought doing an graffiti covered cave could be cool, using key words from their brand, I layered tags everywhere. We also thought If people tag the restroom it would be cool, just more art layers.
For some of the other areas of the wall, I played around with a world, space, fries that are doing different activities like fishing or scuba diving. Although a ton of work, it was one of the most exciting projects I’ve completed ever. It feels so good looking at the finished results and having a client that gave me complete creative freedom.
HEAVY HANDED #3 - ECHO PARK
Description : I’m so proud of Max and Danny, just crushing it, and for the third restaurant, we worked together to transform a totally unique space in Echo Park. The front of the building had some interesting shaped recesses for the Mural to live. Being as this was the third restaurant, in trying to think of a concept It felt like their brand was really blasting off. So it turns out Heavy has blaster jets in his hands, and his Jordan 3’s. We thought it would be cool showing him blasting off into new horizons, just as their franchise is going to new heights. In addition, this was a location really close to Dodgers Stadium, so as an homage to the home team, he dons a new LA baseball jersey fit with blue cap. We see Heavy blast off from the burger world we know from the second restuarant and into the stars.
The rest of the restaurant interior and bathrooms were once again a blank canvas. Keeping with the blast off theme, the interior bar of the restaurant has a series of fries enjoying snowboarding on mountaintops of ice cream, as well as Heavy peeking through clouds as he soars into the stratosphere. We see a close up of Max and Danny as they pilot Heavy through his goggles. Inside each bathroom is a different cosmic experience. The first bathroom is the interior of a space station, with views of the galaxy, alien ships, planets, and Heavy orbiting close by. An LA home-run ball was a fun touch. The second bathroom imagines what life would be like on a distant asteriod, inhabited by eyeball monsters, burger worms, and an exploratory mission of fries.
