The Stencil: Girl with Ice Cream

This stencil by Banksy was spray painted on a wall at Brighton Beach in 2004, and a slightly modified version of the drawing was included in an exhibition at Andipa Gallery in London in 2009.

As graffiti in Brighton in 2004 (Image from: http://www.boredpanda.com/80-beautiful-street-crimes-done-by-banksy/)

The Location:

When I was thinking about where I could shoot this image, my options were fairly restricted due to the fact that it had to be somewhere close enough to an ice cream store, so our main prop would not melt by the time I got to shoot it. I ended up choosing a park right across the street from Hamilton Central (a shopping mall), which has a ‘Wendy’s’ inside.

Wardrobe/Props:

This was one of the images where I really needed to have more control over the wardrobe/prop items to make sure they matched the stencil as exactly as possible. I did try and find similar girls dresses to buy, but nothing looked right, and also it was the wrong season for that sort of clothing.

This is one of a couple of stencils in this project where I really had no choice but to make all the costumes myself (with the help of Mum!) so I looked online for some free patterns I could just download and modify to make the exact costumes that I needed. I found one that was pretty much perfect for this photo, but I needed to add a couple of ruffle sleeves to the dress to try to match the stencil exactly. I bought some stretchy fabric in navy blue (because I wanted a cream ribbon for the bow and thought that would look best) and finished sewing the dress a couple of days before the shoot.

The stick of dynamite was made from the barrel of a pen I snapped in half, stuffed with white tissue paper and then covered in bright red cardboard. The fuse attached is some real Viscose fuse I bought off a guy online.

This is the free pattern I used to make the dress (Pattern from: http://www.burdastyle.com/patterns/child-summer-frock)

The Shoot:

I found the model in this image after her Mum applied to some online casting calls I put out on Star Now - I actually had quite a lot of applications, but I think I only ended up using 2 people from this site for the whole project. The rest of my models were mostly friends and colleagues etc.

We shot this on a really sunny afternoon and I probably would have preferred to shoot this in the morning, but trying to fit 18 shoots in 4 days inevitably leads to sometimes having to settle for less than perfect shooting conditions. The model was also traveling to Hamilton from another city about 1 1/2 hours away, so I needed to allow enough time for her and her family to get there on time.

I had to position the octabox quite high to shade the model from the midday sun, and also to try and recreate the suggested lighting in the stencil as accurately as possible. The model was shot without the fuse going (safety first!), and then once she and her parents had left, I shot a few images with the fuse burning that I could incoporate in the final edit in photoshop. Unfortunately, they came out crap because it was so bright out, so I had to abandon that idea, and just bought a stock image of a bengal light/sparkler burning.

Model was lit with the B1600 + Octabox. See Gear page for more info.