Big fans of artistic expression should check out these creatively painted wind turbines whose cylindrical towers stay green even when they’re multicolored.

Modern wind turbines pose unique challenges for artists: they’re outside, the “canvas” is an exceptionally tall tube, and anything visible from a distance requires a whole LOT of paint. Even so, painting wind turbines provides benefits beyond merely the aesthetic. These painted wind turbine towers from Germany, a world leader in green power, were snapped by Flickr member 100ee-Regionen in early October of 2008.

Finding Fine Folk Art in Findhorn

The ecovillage of Findhorn, in Moray, Scotland, was established in 1962 as “an international center for holistic learning, helping to unfold a new human consciousness and create a positive and sustainable future.” Along with solar panels mounted on building roofs, a nearby wind farm on the shore of the North Sea provides clean and green power to the sustainable ecovillage. “As we see from this fanciful painting on a wind turbine,” to quote the community’s website, “the sacred and mundane are interpenetrating realities at Findhorn.”

Artist Lisa Shaw, assisted by local groups of children and adults, painted murals on three of the Findhorn wind park’s turbine towers after they were installed in 2006. The murals combine educational ecological themes with a pleasing folk-art sensitivity that encourages community members to fully embrace sustainable electric power.

Milk of Human Windness

It seems Michael Schmidt, “the courageous man fighting the dairy board and health department for the right to distribute raw, whole milk,” according to Flickr member andres musta, has another claim to fame: his wind turbine.

This charming and pastoral painted wind turbine was captured by the photographer in August of 2007 and is located at Schmidt’s 100-acre “herdshare” (kinda like a timeshare but with cows and without annoying sales-people) at Glencolton Farms in Durham, Ontario, Canada.

Lemme Atom!

Towering (literally) over Wakasu Kaihin Park, you’ll easily find this 100 meter (330 ft) tall wind power generator in Tokyo’s Koto ward. The giant turbine – one of the largest in Japan and/or in any large urban area – is rated at 1,950 kilowatts of electricity. Bring on the typhoons!

Painted images of Astro Boy (“Mighty Atom” in translated Japanese) and associated characters created by anime legend Osamu Tezuka rise more than halfway up the turbine’s tower. Astro Boy made his first manga appearance in 1952 and the turbine was painted sometime after the tower was erected in 2004. Pink Tentacle profiled this er, windmill with character(s) in October of 2009.

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Blades Of Allegory 10 Artistic Painted Wind Turbines

Fuel me once, shame on you, fuel me twice and you’ll have to paint these huge storage tanks. You can bet the farm these creative tanks will fuel everybody.

The enormous fuel storage tanks populating the world’s many tank farms are usually painted, though not creatively. White is the preferred color: you don’t want a tank filled with huge quantities of flammable fuel to heat up on sunny summer days. Canvases so big and blank are tempting templates for artists, however, and a single artistically tinted tank can transform the mood of an entire tank farm. Take this 10.6 million liter capacity tank at Terminal NZ’s Mount Maunganui storage facility at the Port of Tauranga, spectacularly photographed by Flickr member Paul Oellermann (Paulos75) in July of 2013.

The tank was painted by Cut Collective, an Auckland-based commercial art studio. The 15m (50ft) tall by 30m (100ft) wide mural took four days and nights to complete and required over 200 spray cans of paint. The mural’s theme “represents youth and the idea of energy” according to Ross Liew of Cut Collective.

His & Hers

Flyover country just got a lot happier, though California isn’t exactly in “flyover” territory unless you happen to be, er, flying over it. The point (and we do have one) is that someone, some when, for some reason decided it would be a good idea to paint his & hers smiley faces atop two fuel storage tanks at a tank farm situated between Long Beach and Torrance airport. Another question… why is the male smiley grinning so widely while his lady companion appears much more reserved? Flickr member Rosanne James (rosanne_j) snapped the pie-faced pair – from the air, obviously – in the fall of 2011.

Pay The Bill

According to Flickr member and photographer Allen Forrest (AL904), tour boats ply the Cape Fear river near Wilmington, North Carolina.

We’re not sure how visually appealing such a tour would be, though at least the view improved once this fuel storage tank was painted with a beachfront scene of pelicans at play. Forrest captured the scene in June of 2016.

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Funky Farm More Creatively Painted Fuel Storage Tanks

Exposed to the elements, hand-painted signs on building exteriors chip, crack and fade over time, but one artist is shining a spotlight on these historic illustrations, restoring them through animated and layered projections.

Craig Winslow is meticulous about his work on “Light Capsules,” digging through archived newspapers, magazines and photographs to find ads showing what these signs and their typogrophies originally looked like (in some cases over 100 years ago). The result of one such search recently helped him project over an ad in Winnipeg, Canada for Porter & Co., crockery, china, glassware, lamps, silverware, cutlery, which then switched to another projection for The Home of Milady Chocolates on the same spot.

And it isn’t just about recreation, but also spectacle and preservation. People passing by, used to ignoring faded signs, suddenly stop, look up and start thinking about them and the histories they represent as well as their historic value to a city.

In the last few years, Winslow has brought his projections to cities around the world including Detroit, London and Los Angeles. A lot of the advertisements he projects over provide insights into what was popular in the early 1900s when hand-painted signs were common.

His projections are often layered, cycling through to highlight different stages of ads (or overlapping ones) that have evolved and changed over the decades. Importing digital images, Winslow uses a suite of editing tools to fill in the gaps and create animations.

And while some argue for restoring them outright (using paint), that can be problematic — critics say repainting ruins the authenticity, plus new paints tend to be more vibrant and would be unlikely to represent the original. In a way, Winslow has found a middle ground — his method lets people get a sense of what they looked like without putting the originals at risk.

More from the artist’s website: “There’s an extra element of excitement in signs that are incredibly worn or have multiple layers—The best ghostsigns candidates to become Light Capsules have multiple layers, called palimpsests, providing a compelling canvas which digital recreations can bring a focus to specific layer in time. Projection is ephemeral, non-damaging, and non-invasive, providing a strong preservation solution that traditional mediums can’t provide. Using light as a medium, we can visually explore the stories of every layer, seeing how a building changed throughout the years.”

Do you drive on a parkway and park on a driveway? These unusual painted driveways prove that when it comes to painted pavement, nobody’s really asphalt.

The Milne Boys Home in Gentilly, a neighborhood in New Orleans, LA was built in 1933 to house “orphans and troubled children” – an all too common social phenomenon in the Great Depression. Featuring a cluster of seven antebellum-style buildings, the facility closed in 1986 and was used only sporadically thereafter. Fast-forward to 2005 when Hurricane Katrina caused enough damage to make the campus completely unusable unless one was a squatter or drag-addict – or both.

In 2008, however, things began to change at the old Mllne Boys Home thanks to a multimillion-dollar injection of funding from the state, the city and FEMA. One of the site improvements concerned the campus’s winding driveway, contracted out to AORTA Projects.

“With the help of a crew of approximately 20 volunteers,” explains lead artist Jacqueline Bishop, “I painted the asphalt driveway of the Milne Boys Home with approximately 5,000 simple black bird silhouettes that were individually cut from original drawings and applied with Industrial Zone and Marking paint. Considering there are approximately 460 bird species in Louisiana, we stenciled a variety of these species in an effort to celebrate and raise consciousness about our unique and fragile environment.”

Bishop titled the finished work “Field Guide”. “After experiencing the power of Katrina while sitting in my house, the most immediate, haunting memory after the storm was the deafening silence. There were no birds for ages. It seems appropriate that this project can bring attention to birds who in turn bring life to abandoned areas in post-K New Orleans.”

Tile Of The Century

There’s not much we can tell you about the dazzling, impressionistic tiled driveway above, other than the fact it was photographed on April 1st of 2011… no foolin’! Kudos to Betty Broccoli of Betty’s Fashion Corner page at Tumblr for bringing some much-needed color into the gray monotony that is the pervue of far too many driveways.

Shock & Oz

Alas, there’s no Emerald City at the end of this yellow brick, er, asphalt road though the homeowner must be a wizard of sorts. Located just off Hwy 28 in Bailieboro, north of Port Hope, Ontario, this “brilliant” idea makes a weird sort of sense being there aren’t any visible road signs in the vicinity, so this is one way to attract notice (and alert the pizza delivery guy). On the other hand, the lemon-yellow laneway leads not just TO the highway but oozes over a significant portion of the soft shoulder… Mr Wizard can expect a visit from the Wicked Witch, er, the local county mountie sometime soon.

Treads On Me

You’ll find this patriotic piece of roadwork in Spafford, NY, fronting a home at the intersection of routes 41 and 174. Something tells us the jacked pickup that probably gets parked here sports a Confederate flag on its rear window, because freedom.

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Park Places 10 Paved Painted Personalized Driveways

Due to their sizes and shapes, water tanks and towers lend themselves to artistic embellishment as these dozen creative examples refreshingly illustrate.

A waterpark? In the middle of MY Mojave Desert? It’s more likely than you think… or at least it was, before the Lake Dolores Waterpark (later the Rock-A-Hoola Waterpark and then the Discovery Waterpark) circled the drain for the final time in 2004. The water used to “power” the park(s) came from underground springs fed by the Mojave Aquifer and was stored in an enormous water tower shaped like – and painted to resemble – a Coca-Cola can.

While much of the park has been vandalized and scavenged for metal, the water tank can blame its current tattered & faded state on the Mojave’s blistering desert sun. Kudos to Flickr user Hans Proppe (shadowplay) and Imgur user loganbush for snapping the eerie and evocative images above.

Leggo My Necco

The circa-1927 New England Confectionery Company (NECCO, for short) building in Cambridge, MA is now occupied by offices of Swiss-based pharmaceutical firm Novartis, who graciously repainted the iconic Necco-wafer water tower in 1997. Flickr user Jill Robidoux (jylcat) snapped the tank on January 1st of 2003 and it’s a good thing she did: Novartis de-necco’d the tank in 2004 by painting it over in a boring-by-comparison pharma theme.

Behind The 8-Ball

The giant 8-ball water tower in Tipton, Missouri came and went like a Fast Eddie Felson pool shot in the dark… and then it came back again, this time to stay. According to the Jefferson City News Tribune, in 1968 the water tower was creatively dressed in a billiard-ball theme by its owners, the Fischer Pool Table company. The water tower was ceded to the city and painted all-white after Fischer closed in 1977 but Tiptonians wanted their landmark back so in 1999, the tower was restored to its previous 8-ball livery. Minnesota Fats is likely looking down and smiling.

Cone Job

The only paint on the Grand Central Water Tower in Johannesburg, South Africa, is the aqua blue corporate corporate logo near the top… anything else would be superfluous. The curious conical tower was built in 1997 and stands 40m (131.2 ft) tall, assuming it hasn’t already tipped over.

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Wet Look 12 More Cool Creative Water Tanks Towers