Wonderful Wall of Wings Mural project

I recently finally got around to reading The Tipping Point. Part of the book talks about how disgusting NYC subways were in the 80's. They were riddled with crime and the transformation into making it a happier safer place started with cleaning up the graffiti on the trains. Making the space look nicer was a step in helping people feel nicer. People act like rats when they feel they're trapped in a rat hole. My school has a lovely campus with trees and playgrounds, but there are some ugly walls that needed a little help if we wanted our workspace to feel like it was a more positive environment.

The parking lot was resurfaced and the wall was power washed: a blank canvas for our paint.

We mixed paint colors and loaded rollers. Even my students who are totally blind could work a roller on a wall. It was almost impossible to do it wrong. Some students worked with brushes to go along the bottom and in the cracks, and the teamwork made for a major transformation in a few hours. Every student was assigned the task of sketching out three ideas for wings: We had bat wings, butterfly wings, steampunk wings, dragon fly wings, and more. When we looked at all of the sketches together students voted on their favorite ideas. Several people did peacock wings and several did dragon wings, so that helped tip the scales in their favor.

We drew the wings on walls with chalk first. I'd worried about weekend rain washing it awan, and so I spray painted a few simple outlines for some of the drawings. And then we painted each pair of wings with appropriate colors. This took longer than I expected because there were so many days of rain and freezing temperatures. Luckily the last week before our Winter Break, we had a few pleasant days when we could knock out the paintings to make a wing wall (between hanging our art show and putting the last parts of our student sale together). I can hardly wait to see students use the wall for a photo op and hopefully be inspired to improve themselves, as we have worked to improve our learning environment. 

 

Textured Caulk Paintings

Last year's "caulk on canvas" assignment was such a success that we did it again, except we used latex and acrylic instead of liquid water color, and we created more textures with the wet caulk, rather than just lines. 

 It worked best a few minutes after dried a little on the canvas so it wasn't too sticky and then use back of spoons can create peaks, and combs create waves and lines. Strips of cardboard can push and swirl areas to give it enough tooth that a top coat of paint will stand out from an underpainting.

Mosts of the canvases were covered with spray paint for an even underpainting.The contrasting paint on the top layer gave it a richness that didn't exist when students just added paint to the plain white ground. 

The lines of caulk helped students who are blind feel the edges of shapes, when they were painting. And tactile paintings are always good to have on display at schools for the blind so they can be enjoyed by everyone.