Kings Island International Street Locations (2018)

CLIENT: Kaman’s Art Shoppes
AGENCY: In-house

This project was a solid case of a snake eating its own tail, since I worked at Kings Island for four years as an art ops assistant manager back in the mid-aughts and spent quite a bit of time posted up at an easel in this very area. Or at least this is where you could usually find me when I wasn’t running around handling guest complaints and/or defusing exploding cash registers. I beat my personal best for daily caricatures sales here in 2004 and haven’t scored higher in an amusement park since.

While working on this project, I thought about the fact that either I-Street doesn’t retain much of the “world tourism” feel that it used to when I was a kid—my mom’s side of the family is from a couple towns over from here—or I have a romanticized version of I-Street in my head that is separate from the I-Street where I worked. Regardless, especially with the body art location, I wanted to go for “classic movie traveling map montage” as a theme, and it seemed to work pretty well.

You don’t have to give me any points for remembering that the name of the snake eating its own tail is Ouroboros. It’s one of those relatively useless facts that takes up space in my brain where something constructive like the ability to do long division should be.