Summer Program: Keith Haring Murals

Once again this year, we worked on expanding the Keith Haring-style murals we did the last two years.  This summer was most likely the last summer that we will receive the grant to do the summer program, and we had three panels left in the hallways at the little gym, so we decided to do three murals instead of one!

Needless to say, we didn't quite finish, so I will post the the final, touched up murals once school starts.  I plan on taking the painters who pay more attention to details to finish it up.  We had a lot of great painters this summer, but they started to trickle out of attendance and I was left with, well, the over-eager painters who didn't necessarily pay attention to paint drips on the floor and such.  Either way, I think we accomplished quite a bit for tackling three panels at once!

On Day 1, I drew out a beach scene and we started painting with Chroma Acrylic Mural Paint.

Day 2 continued with the beach scene, and I also added a winter scene and of course a hiking scene...because you can't live at the base of the Adirondacks without making art with mountains! ;)

The other two murals, which can be seen on "Our Completed Murals", were flat color.  For the beach scene, we decided to get a little more fancy and added some cool color blending in the big wave as well as sponge texture for the sand.

I think the beach mural is by far my favorite one of the entire group!  This one just needs a few black lines touched up and the sand redone.  We had some drips and when the student repainted over them, she didn't sponge the sand on the same way as she did the first time.  :-/

Again, these ones just need some touch up on the black lines and then the top coat of non-glossy acrylic.

Friday: Day 3 of Extended Mural

On Friday we managed to get quite a bit done on our mural!  We touched up some of the background and we were able to paint two coats on each of the figures!  Come Monday, we'll have to put a third coat on the yellow figures and the football, get a ladder to paint the top of the sky, and start outlining everything!

I think that we will paint a little bit more...I decided that I would like to do some mini paintings in the white areas above and below the window in between each mural...I envision a cloud bubble with a single physical activity in it...that way we can do the mountain climber, tennis player, roller-blader and soccer player!

We also had a bit of time to do some glazing on Friday.  I pulled out a set of bisque bowls and let the kids go to town glazing.  We used the detail writers and textured glazes that I mentioned in my last glaze post.  Some got real creative with their drips.  I can't wait to see how they turn out!

I also bought a set of 6 of the Mayco travel mugs for the teachers to glaze!

Extended Day: Extending our Mural!

Woohoo!  We were able to get permission to extend our Keith Haring mural that we did last year during the summer program!  Yesterday and today we worked on coming up with some more physical activity ideas to draw on the wall and we painted the background.

We started out by using these awesome manikans I bought from Dick Blick.  These are just the Blick brand 12", hardwood male manikans.  The kids LOVED using them!  They posed them in sports positions to brain-storm some physical activity ideas.

After we had a plan, we got the cart ready with our painting supplies and mural paint, and headed down the hallway!  We are using the Chroma Acrylic Mural Paint.

Last year I had the kids trace each other on butcher paper, cut out the figures and trace them on the wall themselves.  Last year it also took us the entire four weeks to paint the mural, so I decided to draw the figures on the wall quickly for the students so we could get right into painting.

The end of day one's painting progress...

The end of day 2...we did a second coat everywhere we could reach so everything wasn't streaky. We have a hoola-hooper, a volleyball player setting the ball, and a football player kicking a football through the field goal!  Depending on how their attention spans for this, if it only takes us two weeks to do this section, we may start a second section...students wanted to do a tennis player, a roller-blader and a mountain climber too!

Last year, even though I knew you should always start with the background first in a mural, we started painting the figures and did the background last.  This ended up being part of the problem as to why it took us so long to finish the first mural.  This time, I made sure we started with the background, and I also bought some new colors of mural paint so we wouldn't have to mix too many colors.  Last year, we mixed the blue for the sky and the different heat and humidity caused the paint to dry differently in the sky, even though it was from the same batch of mixed paint!  We had to paint the sky almost four times to get it right!  Here's hoping we won't face that problem again this year!