It took weeks of testing to turn an intersection in Berlin into a living art canvas. Forty litres of paint was spilled in a guerrilla art project that turned the wheels of cars into paintbrushes, smearing colour throughout the city’s streets.

After passing by buckets of spilled paint synonymous with the German city’s hardware stores, Dutch artist Iepe Rubingh would watch the sidewalk art that emerged as shoes, bikes and cars tracked the paint.

Iepe was inspired, but he wanted to spill paint on a larger — 40 litre — scale.

“Because I work a lot in a public space it feels that I am painting reality, Iepe told the Toronto Star. “I am not a painter but my work always feels like I am painting reality myself and the world myself.”

But painting reality takes a lot of planning.

“We carefully planned for weeks,” Iepe said in a phone interview. “I knew I had a big responsibility of 100 of cars and people if something went wrong.”

Iepe picked out an environmentally-friendly, water-based, paint for the project that could be easily washed off the streets. Strong colours were ensured by the paint’s purity: 20 kg of pigment and water with chalk to bind them together.

“I started testing it with my bicycle to see if it worked well… if it stuck to the tires. If it made nice patterns,” Iepe said.

“We also did a small test on the street to see how the car drivers (reacted) and (to) see if they would panic or stop or if (the paint) made the road too slippery.”

After drivers continued driving calmly through the sudden bursts of colour, Iepe and 60 helpers prepared for the final intersection dump.

The team, made up of friends from Iepe’s chess boxing club, rented official German railway bicycles and rigged them with buckets at the front to carry the paint. They then loaded the bicycles and the paint into a truck and drove them to the intersection.

After the bikes’ buckets were filled with the wet stuff they set out with cars driven by members of the team.

“After every bicycle driver there was a car driver from our team to secure the situation in case something (went) wrong…,” Iepe told the Star.

Once the paint was dumped, the bicycles calmly cycled down a side street where they were loaded back into the truck and taken elsewhere to be cleaned, eliminating the multi-coloured tracks that could have led police to the paint-dumping culprits.

“You don’t see it in the video. There were tons of police and firefighters (at) the intersection. They took out their test tubes and took a bit of the paint to (their) laboratory. We had posters up saying: ‘Dear police, don’t worry it will rain. It’s water-based paint. It will go away.”

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Although the intersection art project happened a year-and-a-half ago, Iepe did not want to reveal the mechanics behind it until it was clear the art work had been positively accepted by the people of Berlin.

Iepe is currently working on a project for the 10th anniversary of Wikipedia slated for a 2012 launch.