
Schaeffer’s Soap and Candle Works, near Lucas Place at Washington and 20th streets, one of the smelliest places in town.

Inspiration for my color palette was this 1875 lithograph advertising a short-lived Boston area brewery. I liked how the bright red brick and sudsy gold typography (beer and brick sure to important motifs in my drawings also) sat atop dusty brown streets and miasmatic skies. I eyedropper-ed accordingly:

I also tested how the colors would work with the variety of textured paper backgrounds I wanted to use:

Roughed them into my thumbnail sketches for each image:

And started to apply them to my black 'n white ink drawings.

Note that there was no green (or purple) in my palette, which would've normally been the go-to stink color.

I was forced to push yellow and gray to their aromatic extremes.

Big shout-outs to Novachrome, the printer we used for printing the large-format illustrations. Here were some of the swatches we looked at for matching colors:

Here's how they looked on strips of the final wallcoverings during installation, which turned out beautiful.

And here's the full-sized 15' foot wall.

Stay tuned for more walks through A Walk in 1875 St. Louis!