...
And to turn his design (which drew its inspiration from the artwork that you used to see on those citrus labels that California's fruit packing plants used to slap on packing crates back in the early 20th century) into ceramic tiles, Delaney turned to Theodora Kurkchiev and Dimitri Lazaroff of
TND Studio, Inc. Which is this San Pedro-based art studio that specializes in the design and production of ceramic works of art.
In a February 2001 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Theodora recalled what it was like when Tim initially came to TND Studio, asking if they'd be able to pull off the mural component of the DCA entrance project: "Dimitri told (Tim that) it would take at least 19 months to do this, but Disney wanted it in half that time. We started work in February of 2000 ... I worked seven days a week, 12 to 16 hours a day, hand-painting each and every tile (for this project). I couldn't take even one day off in the last six months because I was afraid we would not make it."
"And why was that?," you ask. Because translating Delaney's design into individual pieces of ceramic tile was a fairly labor-intensive process. It involved taking Tim's design (which had broken up in a series of 8-foot-long paintings) and then blowing those images up into 16-foot-tall posters. Which then had to be enlarged into 105% images (because clay shrinks 5% when it's being fired).
Then each piece of clay was baked, it was then hand-painted and glazed (sometimes with 14-carat gold paint). Afterwards, all 14,500 ceramic tiles were alphanumerically encoded so the Imagineers would then know just where to put each piece of ceramic once it arrived on site.
. That's cool.
