I love it when UGP employees do cool things outside of Underground Printing (and inside Underground Printing). I found out today that one of our graphic designers, Ryan W. who is a very talented artist, won the “How Sweet the Sound” Community Art competition and had his art selected to represent the city of Detroit!

Ryan describes the competition and his experience:

“This was for a nation wide choir competition called How Sweet the Sound. It was like the American Idol for choirs and it was sponsored by Verizon Wireless.  Verizon went to each of the host cities and selected one artist to rep the city in a painting, which they would use to advertise the event on billboards, buses , posters, newspapers (Detroit Free Press and Detroit News) and featured on tv and also have available for download as a wall paper background on your cell phone.

Back in February, a rep from Verizon emailed me out of the blue and asked if I would like to represent Detroit.  How could you ever say no to that?  It was the perfect sound board to portray how I see the city especially with everything going down in it right now with the auto industry, people’s homes and the whole Kwame thing.  I finally was able to personally do something uplifting for the city.

When it came to Detroit, I was a distinguished guest and was asked to autograph the posters and postcards of the painting.
The painting has been to all eleven cities in the contest and now has been donated to the Metropolitan Detroit YMCA.

It was a really awesome experience.”

Congrats Ryan! You can check out his artwork below!