Custom Adhesive Outdoor Mural 

Featured Graphics: Metric Mural Final Reveal

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Like many other businesses, we are conducting business through curbside service and delivery. We wanted to bring advertising outside where our customers are — plus show off our graphics printing and installation capabilities.

We decided to update the exterior of our Metric store location with a custom mural printed in-house on our HP 1500 latex printer. We used Drytac anti-graffiti lamination to make our mural durable and easy to clean. To prep the wall and give our mural the best chance at adhering long-term, we first had to power wash it. We opted for a fresh coat of paint so that the colors would pop. The final prep was to let the paint “gas out” for 2 weeks. 

We wanted to thank the sponsors of our mural for their support in our Metric makeover. Thank you to Alonzo Suarez of ASM Painting for power washing our wall to get it prepped for the entire process, Clements Paint for supplying our new coat of paint, Tom Page for installation services, and our very own Vittoria Mottler for the incredible design!

The majority of the mural was all hand cut by our graphics production team, and the music note details and logo were cut by our iEcho router. Considering the face of our building endures some pretty heavy sun exposure, we don’t anticipate seeing any quality changes for the first 6 months. After 6 months, we may start to see some minor fading, but the mural itself, under normal weathering circumstances, will remain intact. The adhesive on the vinyl melts into the textured surface of the concrete, so there shouldn’t be any lifting happening (under normal weathering circumstances) for at least a couple years.

As far as the design goes, we wanted to include the ever-growing Austin skyline with the silhouettes of recognizable buildings across the entire background of the mural. We featured a lot of iconic Austin imagery, because Miller is an iconic staple in the Austin print community. The graphic elements are all representative of Austin and Texas as a whole, which we think all Austinites and Texans can appreciate. The blue color scheme comes from our logo, and a pop of new color represents another aspect of Miller growing and expanding, especially in the Graphics Department.

We featured 6th Street, not only because it is famous in Austin, but also as a nod to our long-standing time on 6th Street before relocating to East 7th. We included the quintessential phrase, “Keep Austin Weird” accompanied by a dancing taco, because us Austinites love our tacos. We paid tribute to our home of 100 years with “512 Home” written down the door, and “We Love Austin” further down the wall paired with a horseshoe — because all Texans ride horses. Being in the Live Music Capital of the World, we had to include some music notes dancing across the skyline. We hope that those who drive by our building find some joy from our mural and may be inspired to change up their space with our help.

We had so much fun coming up with all the design aspects, prepping the space as a team, and sharing it with our community! If you want to add a fun graphic element to your building, space, office, even home, reach out to our graphics team; they would love to help!

To change up your space for the new year, contact Vittoria at Vittoria.Mottler@MillerIDS.com  

Fine Art Scans & Printing

Featured Artist: Anna Lisa Leal

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Anna Lisa was born in Laredo on the border of Texas and Mexico. There, her father planted many fruit trees including tangerine, orange, lime, peach and fig. She spent many days playing under and in the tangerine trees in her backyard. She spent hours drawing in the shade of the trees where her mother set her up with a large pad on a bench and Anna Lisa on a small chair. Anna Lisa says she’s been a creative as long as she can remember — whether it was drawing, dancing or creating in other ways. She continued to draw through her high school and college years, recreating images from magazines and doing portraits on request. Anna Lisa left Laredo at the age of 16 and moved to central Texas where she attended college at Texas State University in San Marcos.

Over time, her love of visual art was set aside for more “practical” studies and ultimately a corporate career. In 2008, as part of her personal renewal, she returned to the garden to draw. Anna Lisa said, “Although I lost my sense of time while I drew, I found myself and inner harmony through art. I felt like a child again. I was experiencing the world with new eyes”, and she hasn’t stopped creating since.

She loves to work with pastels because “the colors are unparalleled – pigments at their purest!” She also calls pastels her adult crayons and has explored the medium voraciously from the moment she picked them up. Upon moving to her current property, she spent the first few years creating art through landscaping. When there was no more room for real gardens, her gardens and its inhabitants began to extend into her artwork. 

Anna Lisa’s artwork embodies the patterns of nature, particularly botanicals. She is driven to create paintings which reflect nature’s captivating beauty, and it is her artistic mission to transport nature’s beautiful design to indoor living spaces. As a lifetime Texan, the various floral and animal inhabitants of the Southwest, specifically Big Bend, New Mexico and Arizona are frequent subjects of her work, as well as the Sonoran and Chihuahua deserts. 

“My heart is with the agave. I am moved by the stateliness of the agave and the seemingly endless variations in size, colors and shapes. I enjoy the colorful and dangerous beauty of cactus, the undulation of the agave leaf imprinted by the now unfurled leaf, and the poignant swan song beauty of the agave flower. But, I am also enamored with tropical flowers particularly those in Hawaii and Costa Rica.”

See more of Anna Lisa’s art on her website.