Overcoming the Mural

For our final action project in the course If These Walls Could Talk we had to bring to life the image in our groups’ swatches, and turn them into a mural inside of our school’s new building. For our entire last unit we focused on making plans to enlarge our mural and make those plans happen. We looked at all of the different options and tested out our different ideas to see what would be best for the area we were given to work in. Our options became more limited when it ended up that we couldn’t work in the actual space until 3 days before our project was due, so we are still in the process of finishing our mural, but we expect a great looking outcome, and for everything to be finished this week.

This mural is a tribute mural to GCE as well as a revolt mural showing GCE’s mission to reinvent education. It depicts a golden boat with 3 people inside going towards a huge wave. The boat is made out of a banner and has the words “Overcoming the Wave” written in it. There were a lot of steps going into making our mural into large-scale. We first made a sketch on a regular piece of paper, then we projected it and traced it on paper, piece by piece, for a total size of 112 x 352 inches, then we mixed paints to get the colors we wanted and painted the pieces of paper, as well as spray painting part of it. We currently still have to wheatpaste the papers onto panels in the new building, as well as add acrylic media as a final touch. For the paint we used mostly blue hues, with a touch of green. We kept a similar color for a lot of the mural and only changed the value and intensity. We also made our boat a shimmery gold to stand out and show victory. Our mural gives a strong and powerful representation of GCE, which is perfect for our space because it is in the entrance, so it is the first thing people will see when they walk in.

Working on the mural was a challenging but very fun experience, there were many bumps along the way and things to work through, but I was really glad to get to work on this amazing project because I think in the end it will end up looking great. There were four different roles during our process-- Artistic Director, Director of Operations, Mule, and Documenter. I had each role at least once, as did the rest of my group members, but in general I was someone who often organized things and kept people on track with what they were supposed to be doing. Throughout the whole process I was also always a part of the cutting, sketching, painting, and pasting. My favorite role was director of operations because I was managing what people were doing and making sure everything was going smoothly which is something I’m good at, because I’m someone who is good at organizing things and managing people to make sure they’re doing what they are supposed to. My least favorite role was being the mule because I don’t like doing the dirty work of running around and fetching stuff, I felt it was an ineffective use of my time because it would be more useful of me to help more with organizing and planning.

We hope that in the end our mural ended up looking as amazing as we planned. I would have preferred to get to work on the space directly instead of having to paint of paper and then wheatpaste. There are four panels in the space and working directly on the walls would have probably looked neater and we would have seen exactly how what we were doing would look, instead of having to wait and hope for the best. On paper you get a thinner paint look, and when you wheatpaste you can tell that the art was done on paper and not directly on the surface. Both options can look really great, just different.