Did You Miss Me!!

Well Hello,

Today is October 10th in the crazy insane year of 2012. This year is full of wonder, excitement, terror, turmoil, panic, and workworkwork. I just turned 29 years old, my daughter just turned 5, my daughter just started kindergarten, I'm in my senior year of college (as my fifth year of college in a row), I am claiming four disciplines for graduation (drawing, painting, print, and sculpture), I have a part time job with a great boss and co-workers that could give him a promotion after graduation, my husband just quit his job because we decided to purchase our own business (its a game store), I am taking care of merchandising and marketing for the business, we only have one car, I have an one and a half hour commute each morning to get to school on time and I work every single day of the week. So the thought of having to try to update this blog on top of all that is quite daunting as I hate things like face book or anything that involves putting your person on display because I like to keep  most things private, at the same time I recognize that the world is against me on that and the best I can hope for is to be deliberate about what I am willing to share and in how much detail.

The purpose for this post is to update this blog with information about my art practice, pieces that I've made, and the crazy roller coaster ride that will be this journey going forward. So to start this I am putting up all the older pictures that I have on my computer with information and then future posts will have more current information, once I figure out how my new camera works.

So first thing I'd like to share is!

This is a mural that I did for Maywood Hills Elementary School. It came about while I was getting my Associates from Cascadia Community College. I established communications with the Northshore school District and offered to paint a mural for them to be kicked off on Martin Luther King Jr's Day of Service on January 18th 2010. Maywood contacted me for a mural and I worked with the principle to determine a space and content for the painting. We knew that we wanted influential figures to be in the design and we wanted the students to have buy in with the design as well. The principle related the desire for which figures to be included with Martin Luther King Jr. based on their involvement with civil and human rights issues. The figures chosen were Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, Gandhi, and Caesar Chavez (I don't have a pic of that portion of the wall for some reason). For the students I created a home work assignment that simply asked them to either write or draw about what was their favorite thing about school. Out of 500 students I got about 60-65% of the assignments back and was able to put all of their ideas into the design.

The entire mural is about 700 square feet and is on two sides of a breezeway wall. We even painted the end caps. The grid method was used to transfer the drawing onto the surface of the walls. Parts of the design were in collaboration with Miriam Keith who was also attending Cascaida Community College at the same time.

The process for getting it all together was fun, I called Rodda Paint Corporate out of Oregon and told them about the project and asked if there was anyway they could help us. They were very generous and donated all the paint from the bone yards of their stores, and were able to provide some materials like brushes and buckets and such. So huge major whoopie thanks to Rodda Paint for all their help!

We worked it out with the teachers of all the classrooms to have their students come out in groups of eight or ten and we would designate sections of the design for them to choose from for painting. In most cases they got to pick the color they wanted to paint with. This was great because we got to talk to them about the design, their color choices, and how they thought everything would go together. They were very excited to see the ideas they shared visualized in the design.

For the initial Day of Service we had about eight volunteers come out, and that was mostly to remove the old artwork and boards from the breeze way and wash down the walls to get ready for primer. I also had a few more volunteers for getting the wall primed, but close to two months in it was just Miriam and me going out there. We had budgeted about three months to get the project done, but due to lack of volunteers we went past the deadline and it was my responsibility to finish. This was a very valuable lesson because the mural became another job for me and I was out there five days a week, rain or shine or snow, (thank goodness it was covered) for 5 to 6 hours at a time for an additional three months after the deadline to make sure that it got finished. I will never forget that experience because I learned so many things about the joy of teaching art to children, the satisfaction of finishing such a large project, and the passion and desire to continue to do public work that affects the community.

I now realize how long this post has gone on, aaannnnd I am thinking that I will just post some of my other stuff in another one so there because its my blog and I do what I want! :P

*hugs*