It starts with a grid. Handwritten and painstakingly measured out atop this year’s design, a piece of 8 by 11-inch printer paper attached to a clipboard holds the key to the Pentacrest lawn painting that will greet the influx of visitors coming to Iowa City for Homecoming week.

On the Monday afternoon of Homecoming week, University of Iowa Athletics Golf Course Maintenance Team member Andy Eiffert was bent over, his head low to the ground and hands covered in black paint, a signal of the hours he’d already been out on the lawn. He was completing the final piece of the painting’s puzzle, the empty space on the lawn’s design to be filled with bright white paint.

By now, Eiffert knows about how big the patch of grass on the west side of campus is. He has been painting on the space directly beneath the Old Capitol Building for four years, beginning in 2021 when FOX Sports’ Big Noon Kickoff Program visited Iowa City for the Iowa-Penn State football game.

However, even with all the years of painting under his belt, he still has to be extremely precise. Holding the paint sprayer by hand, Eiffert has a single chance to get the design perfect and recognizable at ground level and by air.

Eiffert loves painting on fields and lawns, whether it be for athletic purposes or miscellaneous projects, like the Homecoming paintings. He’s painted at Iowa’s athletic events, including games at the Rose Bowl and Wrigley Field, and school designs, like the UI Hospitals and Clinics “We Stand Together” message during the COVID-19 pandemic.

For Eiffert, the enjoyment comes from the process of creating the design and seeing it come to life.

“Creativity, the being able to take something that is on a 8 by 11 piece of paper and turn it into any size logo I want, that’s part of it,” Eiffert said.

Beginnings of a tradition

The UI has many staple Homecoming traditions: the Homecoming Parade that loops through Iowa City, the Corn Monument, and the flags representing every student’s nation that hang from the mint green Iowa Memorial Union Bridge. However, Eiffert did not imagine that a new tradition would be born when he first painted for the FOX Sports event.

When the paintings began in 2021, Eiffert said they were focused on the Big Noon Kickoff event on the east side of the Old Capitol Building. It was No. 2 Iowa hosting No. 3 Penn State, and the university wanted to create a special painted design for the show’s hosts to use, for example, plays.

It was then that UI Senior Vice President and University Architect Rod Lehnertz reached out to the university’s landscaping services team to see if they could have a football field painted on the east lawn, including a Tigerhawk logo and the endzones that fans would find in Kinnick Stadium. Eiffert then asked if the team could also paint a logo on the west lawn.

Lehnertz said he originally wondered if the UI Athletics and landscaping teams would be too busy to paint a design on the west side when they first approached him with the idea. However, Lehnertz now sees it as a strong collaboration between multiple university departments.

“We find it a great way for the athletic department to be part of the University of Iowa’s excitement around those big moments as it has become a bit of a tradition during our homecoming week,” Lehnertz said. “So we invited them back after that, we invited with an offer to them the next year’s homecoming, and they said, ‘Absolutely, and what do you want us to paint?’ Whatever you’d like to paint is really how we’ve done it, and they’ve done it a little bit different every year.”

Working with Eiffert, the landscaping and groundskeeping teams, and the UI Athletics Department has not been difficult over the past four years, he said.

“It’s easy to coordinate these even on the short term. And we love the creativity and artistic talents of [Eiffert] and the team,” Lehnertz said. “The thing looks great, and every year it does, so I look forward to what each year’s piece of art on the west side of the Pentacrest will bring.”

Lehnertz added that the painting of the lawn is a newer tradition that fans and visitors can enjoy, but one that already fits in with preexisting and beloved customs at the university.

“A lot of great traditions on the campus, and that’s what we love about [it]. Any university campus has many of these,” Lehnertz said. “The nice thing is many of ours that are meaningful, if you think about the Pentacrest painting, the flags over the IMU bridge on homecoming, the touching of [Nile Kinnick’s] helmet, the wave, all of these things are within the last decade, and all yet, to a new student or people coming…they feel like they’ve been here forever.”

Behind the scenes of the big logo

Most schools, when painting a giant logo, have a cutout stencil to follow and a GPS machine that helps lay out the design. At the UI, this work is done by Eiffert and his team.

Eiffert starts with a grid graphing ruler and a sheet of paper with that year’s design on it. He then figures out the dimensions he wants for the painting. For this year, the dimensions are 71 feet by 64 feet, drawn as stick-straight boxes on top of the design on the paper. Each box represents two feet.

The drawing is then turned into a physical map on the lawn as Eiffert goes to each point on the design sheet that would correlate to a spot on the field and places a marker.

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“It’s a lengthy process. It’s the old school way of doing it, but if we would buy that stencil to paint, it would be $5,000 to $10,000, cut and made,” Eiffert said.

The physical part of the process for this year’s painting began last week on Friday when Eiffert spent around five hours out on the lawn measuring the design. The painting began Monday morning around 8:30 a.m. and wrapped up in the afternoon around 3 p.m.

The largest yearly cost is paint, he said. Nearly a dozen five-gallon buckets sat under a big tree with bright red leaves on Monday while Eiffert painted, holding the white, black, and yellow paint necessary for the design. He added that it looks like a lot of paint is used, but one bucket mixed with water will create three buckets of paint.

Eiffert then uses an air pressure sprayer to shoot the air, water, and paint mixture onto the lawn by hand.

For Eiffert and the painting team, there are no second chances. This year’s design, an Iowa pennant above a banner reading the text “homecoming” and a football with 2024 inside of it all on a shield-shaped icon, proved more difficult than other years. The grid was easier to lay out with past designs, including the retro flying hawk and block letter I.

This year’s design matches the 2024 Homecoming button design, including its words and intricate details, meaning more aspects to grid on the lawn perfectly or face potential error. The words “homecoming” and “Iowa” were measured-out, free-handed letters.

“It’s basically like paint by number. I can paint the flags. That took a while. This one was just straight grid it out and lay it out and measure it.” Eiffert said. “If I screw it up, that’s the thing, I mean, you’re doing it one-off.”

Boden Memmel, a senior majoring in statistics with a minor in sport and recreation management, works as a groundskeeping lead for UI Athletics. He is the student leader of the grounds group and helped Eiffert with the painting project this year and two years ago, along with other painters.

For past designs that have been repeated, the team already had templates to follow. This year, it was completely new.

“This year is just me and Andy,” Memmel said. “We didn’t have a template, so we had to measure everything out, and it was a lot of math, a lot of triangles, a lot of thinking that I didn’t think would go into it.”

For Memmel, being a small part of Iowa Athletics is why he loves his job. The painting of the lawn is unusual in his role.

“Big logos like that aren’t very common for us to do. Our Field painting responsibilities are generally just straight lines on track, soccer, stuff like that, so that was a much larger process of painting than what I’m typically used to, but it’s pretty similar to what we usually do process-wise, like the actual painting part of it,” Memmel said.

The most fun part of the painting of the Pentacrest lawn comes when the painters get to see their design come to fruition before their eyes.

“When we started, it was just a clump of grass, right? And we had a logo on paper that we had to try to get onto the grass. Seeing it come together from every step…like that part of it was pretty cool. Obviously, it’s tiring walking around, thinking that much, but I think it’s worth it to be able to produce something like that that everybody walks past and gains pride from,” Memmel said.

Eiffert already has design ideas for next year. Ideally, he’d like to paint the 2004 Herky on Parade design. For him, the paintings are about reacting to something recognizable that all Hawkeye fans can enjoy.

“Old school Herky, like, to me, that’s more homecoming,” Eiffert said. “Find something old and do it and then bring everybody back.”