Yellow!

This wall, which the lighted Joker poster is hanging upon, is the center point of my store. I'd gotten an idea of how to do some "simple" punch up things for the store from a workshop I attended at the ComicsPro retailer meeting in Memphis a few weeks ago. This is the before work commenced photo.
Yesterday morning I started painting and didn't cover anything, but quickly found out how stupid that was because, of course, most comics already have enough color without me making paint variants. I was also having a bitch of a time painting as I hadn't cleaned the brushes I was using that well after using them on a house project last week and I hadn't thought that I was going to have to use a primer before applying my new color on the existing grey.

So after doing about 5% of the wall and deciding it looked like crap, went back to the paint store and got some better brushes. Then my friend and new helper here at the store, fearless Rob Perez, came in and originally I was going to have him babysit the nerve center of the store (the cash register / POS system), but he said he'd do the painting if I wanted him to. So I wisely said "Sure, give it a stab" because my painting of this wall wasn't going as smoothly as the walls I've painted in our house. Rob quickly determined that a primer was going to be needed, so off to the paint store he went. The primer was the trick, and while it still took longer then I would have thought (due to having to put on several coats of primer and the differences between the original and new color), I could see that Rob was making the wall happen the way I wanted it to look.
Actually I couldn't be happier with the end result and after finishing putting up the posters and such back up on that wall this morning, I definitely think that this yellow accent wall was just the visual pop out that I thought it would be. Any business has to do things differently from time to time to keep from stagnating and other then adding my POS system to streamline my store's data and ordering operations last year, I haven't done much different visually in a while with the store.

When I was telling one of my customers (and a regular reader of this blog) about this project forthcoming, he seemed a little underwhelmed that this was what I was talking about when I blogged about some ideas I took back with me from the Memphis ComicsPro show (I may have misinterpreted his reaction though). Actually if I didn't misinterpret his reaction, I can in retrospect understand how whatever I do, short of expanding my store into the next space or moving (both of which I have no near future plans of doing), would live up to my tone in my blog entry of things I was thinking of doing here at the store after coming back from Memphis. I think that, for me, this one wall having a color change is a dramatic change enhancement because I'm here six days a week, but to my customers the most I can hope for is that they appreciate these changes on at least a subconscious level. To illustrate what I just said, as of 5pm today (a few hours after I've completed that wall), not one of the people who've been at my store today have commented on my yellow wall (admittedly there's a lot of things going on elsewhere in the store and most people know where they're going within the store and or noticed the change, but just didn't feel the need to comment). I do hope people like changes like this that I make and that they'll tell me if they don't (even though it's not something easily undone, I do take negative comments into consideration when thinking about new changes). Anyway, I'm not fishing for comments / compliments, so please don't take the preceding as such.

I have another painting project that I want to do here at the store (no it doesn't involve painting the whole rest of the store yellow as much as I like yellow), but I'm going to hold off on that because as I thought more about it, it is going to be a really big project and the next thing on the store's plate of things to do is to finally get my dumb storage room of comic books into my back issue boxes here at the store so that they can find nice homes (and this will be started this tomorrow and should be mostly finished in a couple of months). I'm thinking that when I finally get ready to do my next painting project, that I'll have a little poll here at the store to see how present customers think about what I'm looking to do and maybe there'll be suggestions for a better way to do it that I haven't considered. Not so secretly, I will cry if everyone doesn't love my yellow wall though (and I don't think my photo here does the change justice, so you'll have to stop by for the full visual onslaught)!