Discover Cayuga
June 3, 2021The work we did would never have been possible without some fantastic source material, and for that we have to thank the incredible artists form the Guild of Natural Science. They sent us over page after page of gorgeous, hand drawn and colored creatures, and when it was all said and done, we had printed roughly 60 feet of beautify illustrated wildlife. From the smallest microbes to the massive sturgeon, which we were informed can grow up to 10 feet long, our decals contained a fantastic number of diverse animals and, if we can pat ourselves on the back, they turned out great.
Recently, Dataflow was contacted by Discover Cayuga Lake with an extremely unique job—they wanted to cover the inside of their boat, the MV Teal, with illustrations of wildlife that can be found in and around Cayuga Lake. Perfect! This is exactly the kind of job that gets us excited.
The MV Teal is a good-looking boat of a decent size that can be seen giving public and private tours of the lake, as well as taking students on educational adventures. If ever you find yourself in Ithaca, we can’t recommend them enough. Discover Cayuga Lake contacted us hoping we could provide visual aids to for the MV Teal’s educational tours, making it the first time we’d ever been asked to put decals on the inside of a boat.
The installation proved to be easy and enjoyable. According to leading experts, adhering vinyl decals to the inside of a boat is exactly 57 times easier than applying them to the outside of a boat. The real difficulty lay in deciding where on the boat to place the different types of wildlife, as the animals on the decals were grouped according to their specific class (aka their phylum, if you can remember your last biology class). Two members of the Guild of Natural Science were with us on the MV Teal, and they decided that the best, and presumably most scientific, way to orient the decals was with the birds up high in the bow, the fish down in the aft and everything else in the middle.
The job turned out great. A ton of effort went into it off, and it’s easy to see how all of that work will help enrich the MV Teal’s passenger’s understanding of the natural world around them. The people from the Guild of Natural Science were happy, the crew of the MV Teal were happy, and so were we. We left the installation already making plans to come back with more decals, and that was that. A job well done on a project that makes people’s lives just a little bit better; What more could you ask for?
