It’s that time of year again. Mural time with NY Cares. My roommate and I are doing another mural together, and actually at the same school as the other one. The school was so happy with the mural we did for the last NY Cares Day, the principal specifically requested us to work on the new mural.
Here’s the space. It’s a very long wall (it’s about 80 feet long by 6 feet high). It’s also in a narrow hallway, so we won’t be able to project the image onto the wall like last time; we’ll have to transfer whatever we come up with freehand.
The wall is across from the library, which is also a somewhat long wall, painted a very bold red and decorated with some posters. The principal thought it would be cool to have kids reading on the wall we paint. Haven’t worked on any sketches yet, but we still have some time. The actual event isn’t until July.
Here it is…the NY Cares mural project. Painting started around 9:30 am Saturday and finished around 2:30 (minus lunch break). There were approximately 25 volunteers working on the mural. The “paint by letter” idea was much appreciated and made painting go so much smoother. See the mural from start to finish in this timelapse documentary. Enjoy!
Tracing the projected image. As you can see, we didn’t trace it exactly. That was the great thing with this design, it’s flexibility. We adjusted a couple different panels to make them lower so we could reach without using a ladder.
Sketching on the wall. We started with the fourth panel since it was the closest to the outlet (in hopes of the projector reaching…unfortunately it did not). It was also one of the simpler ones, which made it a great test wall.
This, by the way, is the mural design that we went with. It’s a combination of sketches we both did. It’s not surprising the school chose this one as it is really targeted towards the Ft Greene neighborhood specifically, with all the brownstones, Ft Greene Park, and fun stuff kids/people do in the neighborhood (bbq, tons of playgrounds, bubbles in the park, ice cream!).
This was me playing around in photoshop to get a better idea of what the sketch would actually look like on the wall. My sketch was really tiny, about the size you see in the post. If this is the one we go with, when we sketch it out bigger we can probably add more food or space the characters out a little more. And I’m thinking the giant silverware gets repeated on the inside of the columns as well, unless we think of something else. Suggestions anyone?
This is my design for the mural project. Happy Lunch! I also worked on a couple others but we ruled them out for either being too detailed (we have one day to paint this with who knows how many volunteers, most of whom have probably never held a paint brush before not to mention the time it would take to transfer to the wall) or because of the columns; the columns are really giving us lots of grief trying to figure out how to incorporate them…there are so many!
So the idea with this design is to keep it really basic. The mural is in the lunchroom of the school, hence the lunch idea. One idea we initially had was to do a food pyramid, but that seemed so boring. But, thinking about the food groups and a balanced lunch gave me the inspiration for this piece.
My roomie is working on her design and we submit them this weekend to let the principal pick one. Next weekend, sketching on the wall.
So this pic shows even more of the wall and gives an even better idea of the scale. Sheesh! This space is really really really big. Hopefully we get a lot of volunteers to help paint it.
Sheena Hisiro has been drawing since she could hold a pencil. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY where she is still drawing and loving every minute of it. Sheena is currently illustrating children's books, designing greeting cards, and drawing cupcakes.
BFA in Communications Design from Pratt Institute.
