Kieran Hadley Mirror Ball artist

Leeds mirrorball artist Kieran Hadley talks about his move into creating mirrorball s for the famous artists like Kylie Minogue and Katie Perry.

Transcript

00:00I'm Kieran Hadley from Third Eye Signs. I'm a sign painter, mural painter, gold leaf artist,

00:06designer, maker of shiny things. We started with Roller Girl Gang commissioning some painted

00:15mirror balls and they were like, can you? And because I'm cocky, I was like, yeah, probably.

00:21And it turned out they look great. And then just ticked over from there for the last few years,

00:27people started getting commissions for them and then more and more people started getting

00:31commissions for them wanting all sorts of wedding, event, party, gifts, decoration, things on them.

00:40They got bigger and bigger, started doing some whoppers and then started getting some big orders

00:48for like 50 plus at a time and some celebrity clients and things. This year, Kylie Minogue,

00:56for her tension tour. Peter Hook bought one at an NSPCC charity auction last week and currently

01:07Katy Perry for her end of tour gift. It requires being slow and deliberate and working over lots of

01:17curves and bends and having to look at your own reflection for longer than is ideal.

01:22And then if there's a lot of them on the go, it requires hanging a whole room full of them and

01:29keeping them all safe and then safely getting them wherever in the country they need to be.

01:33But it's, you know, it's not more of a challenge than some of the other things I do.

01:38Yeah, it's fun. I'm a sucker for shiny things. I really am. I just, you know, I like stickers and

01:46gold and things that are, you know, magpie fodder. Because there's not many sign painters in Leeds,

01:53I've kind of got the luxury of bouncing between working with gold, doing murals, designing t-shirts,

02:00making merch. I get to just do whatever people need to do. I just kind of solve problems with

02:05paint and design. So there's not too many days that are the same as another, which is good for

02:12some of the short attention span. If you ask me what I'm actually doing it, painting murals is a

02:18giant pain and I swear and curse and my back hurts. But painting big, like ambitious murals is the one,

02:27I think. Like once you've done a really big one, you just want to do one a little bigger and a little

02:32bigger. So I'm after doing some like whole buildings or whole big sides of tall buildings

02:39would be the one, I think. We've done some big ones. We did like a 40 meter tall one for the

02:45Youth Poet Laureate down at Bruntwood at the bottom of town earlier in the year. That was a beast, like

02:53round, wrapped around three sides of a building, all on rough brick. Done a lot of ones in shops.

03:02Done some kind of gable ends, big pieces as well. I did the background for Rob Burrow's one. I did

03:09not paint that lovely portrait there. I got to choose that Eves Klein blue there.