My name is Chris Bates, some artist living in Fort Collins, Colorado. I've been doing murals for the past decade, plus I've been drawing in this style with the black and white line drawings I call fine tunes that tell stories of people's lives or places using interior images to build up the story and create the actual subject doing a mural of Harper Gough, one of the most talented people ever to come out of the town I grew up in. This whole project was a partnership with Brinkman, which is a big development town. They're doing this redoing this whole block, full town. They renamed me the exchange. Initially they hired me to do a bunch of small projects, transforming electric boxes, the gas meters, water drains, things like this, and art pieces. They don't have Brinkman, they don't have an developer that won the corporate art into a whole block of downtown, or something that I never kind of ran into before. They were really supportive and they were just in to see what ideas that I had. Making my vision happen and they just let me run with things. Anytime I start one of these drawings, I kind of start with a little road map. So I have a kind of image like this that I work off of. And then it's just kind of like a guide to where I go. And then I've been using these mallocov markers and golden high-flow liquid acrylic paints. And it's just kind of interpreting where areas go, what's going to be a dark black and using line techniques to kind of create gray scale. So it's just differentiating them. I think this is lines how close they are together to kind of create different levels of gray. So that when you step back, you don't see the lines at all, you just see the image. But when you get a close, it's just this explosion of line work. It's stories, so every single little image in here tells this life story. And from there I spent three to four weeks just kind of researching Harborgoth's life. Once I created the image that was going to be the foundation of the mural, I just started incorporating all the things I learned about him into illustrations to start to build the story of his life. When you're looking at it, you can interpret what Harborgoth did in his life. You can look at it as a whole, you can look at his individual drawings, you can look at it as line work. So it's something that has tons of different levels and ways to appreciate the artwork. He's one of the most accomplished people that's probably ever come out of four cons. He helped develop Main Street Disneyland, which a lot of the architecture is modeled after four cons. And he also worked on art direction for 20,000 leagues under the sea and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. During the process of researching and creating this mural, I just kind of come to realize how impactful something like this can be and is going to be for our community. So being able to use this mural as an education tool for the kids that are growing up in this town, to show them, here's a person that was born here, raised here, and went on to do amazing things. And hopefully that can inspire some young people growing up to feel like that's within their capabilities as well. And also to kind of honor this person that had so much to give and offer the world and be able to memorialize him and tell his story in a way that he would appreciate. I think that having art out there accessible for people no matter what your background is, where you're from, that's the stuff that inspires me and that keeps me wanting to do public art. .