Portland Timber Flag

Epipheo Portland was tasked with creation of a One-of-a-kind Flag to be auctioned off at Art Takeover, to benefit Operation Pitch Invasion's Bless Field project. 6 talented design groups in Portland (Instrument, Nemo, Roundhouse, W+K 12, Epipheo, Beam & Anchor) were asked to take a blank canvas 5' x 3' “flag” and design a piece that represented “Portland”.

Todd Quackenbush and myself ended up doing the heavy lifting on this project and collaborated to create a unique art piece. We sketched, photocopied, pen tooled and swapped .AI files on our way to a strong digital design. From there an old leather couch became the final canvas. Etchop.com (a lovely local laser engraver) then graciously beamed our digital design onto the ancient leather using black magic and complicated mathematic algorithms. The leather needed to be cut into quarters to fit under the laser. The dark green couch, and black engraved colors lacked the contrast we required, and thus Todd and I were forced to distress the majority of the remaining raised surface with tape. We basically waxed the leather for a day (full brazilian). The last step was reassembling our pieces with some insanely potent, industrial strength rubber cement. Yea, we huffed glue and got high on the roof. Then we just sat back and admired our flag, which ended up fetched the highest auction price. At which point Todd and I high-fived (a bunch of times). It wasn't a competition necessarily, but we won.