Big Picture, in partnership with ISA and sponsored by Fujifilm and HP, is excited to announce the first-ever Best of Wide Format Awards. These winning projects are the most creative, innovative, and inspiring in our field and truly showcase how print service providers push the boundaries of wide-format digital print.

Palos Verdes Art Center: Douglas Kirkland Building Wrap Tribute

Print Shop: CR&A Custom 
Location: Los Angeles
Tools and Supplies: HP Latex 3100, 3M Controltac Graphic Film IJ160

A picture is worth a thousand words, and for the Palos Verdes Art Center’s Douglas Kirkland exhibition, each picture had to be perfect. The exhibit honoring Kirkland – an award-winning Hollywood photographer who rose to fame in the ‘60s and ‘70s for his intimate portraits of stars including Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, John Lennon, Meryl Streep, and Charlie Chaplin – required iconic images to be converted to wide-format exterior wall murals. The catch? All of the imagery is world-famous, requiring every detail and color to be exact, and some photos that were taken as early as 1961 had never been converted to digital form.

After turning down a number of proofs from other PSPs, the client turned to CR&A Custom to bring Kirkland’s work to life. The shop worked closely with the art center to scale the images to the exact measurements of the building and CR&A utilized a meticulous color control process to ensure the wide-format digital print was an exact match to the vibrant photography. The shop output 1927 square feet of graphics using an HP Latex 3100, covering the entire building in Kirkland’s art spanning nearly 60 years. When the photographer first saw the wrap, he “became nostalgic and teary eyed as he viewed his lifetime of work for the first time in large-format print. In his own words, he called it ‘magic,’” says Carmen Rad, CR&A Custom CEO/president.