Parallelism Project Morphs in Mural

Instead of working on the parallelism assignment, I'm creating another mural, a project that spun off of our previous chalk mural. While we were working on our chalk mural in the courtyard, a teacher approached us about working on a mural in her room. She teaches computer classes and said that for years she'd been wanting to paint a mural in her room to help make the technology classes more appealing to women. She explained that women make great programmers but they often don't chose that course of study because they feel uncomfortable in that environment/ feel as though they don't belong . Later in the week we went to look at the wall she had in mind and started sketching out our ideas. At first we were thinking about doing a landscape of some sort, but then Hannah suggested something more graphic and bold that would have a larger impact on the space. She found this picture for inspiration. We loved the bright colors and the organic shapes, and plan to also incorporate bubbles and fish to the leafy background. Instead of using the darker hues as our background, we switched to turquoises which girls in the class said were more appealing to them. This past week we started painting the background color of the wall, a mix of three tints of turquoise. We also blocked off the wall to look like a portal to further the illusion of being under the sea.

Completed Courtyard Mural

At first I wasn't too excited about the idea of working with chalk, I wasn't sure how we would be able to make our mural realistic and add in details. Once we got started though, I really enjoyed this project. Chalk turned out to be a ton of fun, especially blending it and being able to layer the colors and experiment with the texture of the brick wall in the background. An unexpected aspect of this project that made it especially fun was that while we were working in the courtyard teachers would come by and comment on our art, often with insightful ideas and perspectives. Being centrally located in the courtyard gave me the opportunity to interact more with others during the course of this project which was really neat.