For the third unit of my Art History Elective, "If These Walls Could Talk," we worked in teams and come up with a mural to put in our new school building. Yes, they are allowing us to make full murals on the walls of the space in our new school building! There's a lot of responsibility and very high expectations, which ultimately makes this project even harder to pull through. I loved the original and creative ideas my group and I came up with. There was a lot of confusion and a bit of arguing, but we pulled through. I'm so glad we were granted the opportunity to help spice up the new school. I hope you enjoy our creativity, we made this for you as well!
Imagine an assortment of different faces staring at you from one collaged face, all on one wall. Also imagine that those faces are pasted on top of very beautiful stenciled flowers. Well, that is our mural. The media used to carry out our project was mostly spraypaint or block-printing ink. The first step in our long process was to go along the stairs that we were assigned, and just clean the walls. This took a bit longer than anticipated, but it was fun, as was the rest of the project, which I will explain more thoroughly. While the wall dried, my peers and I started the taping process. The taping process consists of using tape to cover up certain parts of the wall that you don’t want to get paint on, and it took a very long time to cover all 5 walls. Luckily though, after the taping process, painting wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Painting took 2 or 3 days tops. We chose a light, kind of silver color and it looks very nice in my opinion. After painting, we started with our block printing and spray painting. We used a white ink for block printing the flowers onto the West and East walls. We used black, red, and white spray paint for our stenciled flowers. We decided to create flowers to represent the beauty & growth of our school! We created the flowers by carving material to slap on the surface with paint on the slapped-on side. The other method we used for the creation of the flowers was stenciling, which consisted of tracing and cutting out the flowers shapes and spray painting it on the wall. The good vibes coming from a bigger and better environment was enough to give us the idea of a positive and serene background like a flower. After the beauty comes the uniqueness of the piece. My group and I decided to create collages of people from our school. Each of the collages are unique in their own way, as each collage is made by a different person. The collages were wheatpasted over the flowers on the wall. Wheatpaste is a kind of adhesive mixture of flour and water that allows things to be hung or pasted up on a surface.
The roles in our group were quite simple. There was a Documentarian who took pictures and videos of us while we worked through the project. There was a mule who went back and forth to make sure we had the needed materials to complete our project. There’s the Director of Operations and Artistic Director who worked hand-in-hand together to make sure the project is working smoothly and looks good. My favorite role was Director of Operations because I was the man making sure everyone was on task. I really didn’t like Documentarian because it took away from the experience. I didn’t enjoy filming people doing the job that I helped put together. I wanted be in the field! Even though the outcome was quite nice and I loved how it came out, I would have loved more access to higher places on the walls and more time to make the mural the BEST it can be.
I had an amazing group of people working with me on this project and the overall experience was really cool and life-changing to even get a chance to have such a big impact on the GCE Community. I would like to also thank my school for the chance, and I hope they love the effort we put forth as much as we do.
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