Going Old School With A Twist, Pasadena Company Brings Hand-Painted Billboards To LA

Look skyward as you head north on surface streets toward Altadena, and sooner or later you'll see something a bit out of the ordinary at the intersection of Lake Avenue and Mariposa Street.

It's a billboard emblazoned with the famous wild parrots of Pasadena. And it looks and feels like no other billboard you can find in all of L.A.

"They're local to this space," said Amber Easton. "We wanted to create something that was representative of what we are doing. [It's] a local message to the community."

Easton is an art director of Craft Ads, a new Pasadena-based company that hand-paints billboards.

"It's very simple. We want to make billboards beautiful," Easton said.

Craft Ads seeks to do just that by harkening back to the roots of this commercial art form, owner and co-art director David Lawrence said.

Craft Ads took out two billboards in Altadena to advertise their new hand-painted billboard business.

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Fiona Ng

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LAist

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"There was a time when all of the ads were hand-painted and it made for a more delightful experience," he added. "We want to bring that back."

Billboards as art

Lawrence said he has long had a love affair with billboards. "I love that they are cinematic in scale with the impact of print advertising," he said. "You get this moment. And you can do really, really clever things with it. And I've always loved that."

Incidentally, the inspiration to get into the business came to him when he saw artist James Rosenquist's "F-111," a massive piece of artwork that itself was inspired by billboards and touches on concepts like advertising, consumerism and war.

"When I learned that he was a large scale commercial painter, I was like, I want to do that. And that kind of started the ball rolling," he said.

Lawrence went into the mural industry — which produces large scale advertisements on walls and the sides of buildings — focusing on studio art production and color mixing.

Commercial muraling, Lawrence said, can be physically demanding work.

"I noticed that nobody was doing hand-painted billboards. And it sounded like such a beautiful kind of synthesis of everything," he said.

Then, he met Easton in a couple years ago at the most Los Angeles of settings — a stand-up comedy class. The two got to talking, and Lawrence shared his idea for Crafts Ads with Easton after learning she was also in the professional muraling industry. In her case, she painted murals.

"I immediately knew that it was a wonderful idea," Easton said, who added she also admired the hand-painted process once used for billboards. "As our world becomes more digital, I have a desire to create in the physical space more and more."

David Lawrence and Amber Easton of Craft Ads

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Fiona Ng

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LAist

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A brief history of billboards

Large scale outdoor advertising — defined as those measuring more than 50 square feet — started showing up on American roadsides in the 1830s to entice circus goers, according to the industry trade group Out Of Home Advertising Association of America.

By the turn of the century, a standardized billboard structure was created, allowing retailers to produce ads that would fit any billboard space across the country. From there the industry has continued to grow.

For the longest time, these billboards were painted by hand — until about the 1990s, when new technology rendered the practice obsolete.

How billboards were once hand-painted

Richard Hamlin is a Los Angeles-based lawyer who for decades has worked in law governing billboards. He remembered when these giant advertisements were still being done by hand.

"They'd have a dark room, and it had a big copper mesh on it and they would unfold a white poster paper, and tape it up against the mesh," he said.

The workers would then project the image they were going to use onto the paper. "Then they would take an electric pen and touch the pen to the outline of the pictures, and that would burn holes in the paper," Hamlin said.

Once the paper was put up on a billboard, workers would "puff charcoal through the holes in the paper" to get an outline of the image for it to be hand-painted by somebody on a cherry picker.

It would take 30 days to paint a billboard, Hamlin added.

Hamlin also pointed out this factoid: Inside the entrance to the room where they hand-painted billboards at the Foster & Kleiser plant in Los Angeles — a pioneer outdoor advertising company — a sign stated, "Through these doors walk the greatest artists on earth."

"And that was pretty accurate," Hamlin said. "Imagine painting something like [that] now."

David Lawrence and Amber Easton at Craft Ads.

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Courtesy Craft Ads

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Taking the baton, but with a twist

It is that craftsmanship, imagination and delight that Lawrence wants to bring back. His first obstacle was how to do it cost effectively.

"I wanted to do full scale hand-painted billboards ... in a studio, at full scale, on a ladder. And the overhead was significant," Lawrence said. "I was stuck there for a very long time."

He then settled on another process that would preserve the bespoke quality by essentially hand-drawing a smaller scale of a billboard ad, then scanning it and blowing it up.

"That is where we can save so much money on a hand-painted ad that we can bring them back to the local business," Lawrence said.

Lawrence and Easton then took out two billboard spaces in Altadena a couple months ago to test their processes with ads featuring Pasadena's wild parrots.

"Our neighborhoods used to be filled with advertisements painted by other people who lived in that neighborhood," Lawrence said. "And everybody would be like, Bob painted that, or Sally painted that."

Lawrence noted that a large percentage of outdoor advertising, including billboards, are taken out by local businesses for local residents. He thinks Craft Ads fills a need in the market to help businesses in L.A. stand apart.

"We want to work with the Altadena companies. We want to work with Side Pie. We want to work with MIYA. I would love to do a Christmas board with Altadena Hardware," Lawrence said.

Easton is setting her sights further.

"I'd love to work with the billboard lawyers, personally. Their style is very different, right? Because it's about efficiency," Easton said. "But if any of those lawyers want a true art piece, please come see us."