What do you do when you see something like this? Do you run in the other direction? I wouldn’t recommend that. We have a job to do. my art army showed up with a lot of excitement. This was the day that they were waiting for. But hold on…it’s not like you can just go up to the wall and paint. Prior to even painting we went over the final draft. We visualized our plan of attack. I reminded them that we must start from the furthest background and move to the foreground. The next thing we needed to do was lay out our grid. We were working with 3″ squares in paper and now they were going to have grid the wall in 3 foot intervals. 3 inches to 3 feet is a wicked challenge. It was even more of a challenge to get the snap line tools to work properly. The first problem we ran into was the color of the chalk, which was peach. Now how are we supposed to make distinguishable straight lines when the chalk lines blend in with the wall? I send a person to the local hardware store to pick up a blue color. Now everything should work out, right? Wrong!

We get hit with knots in the line. These are 100 foot snap lines. This is supposed to be the easiest thing to do… but nooooooooo. So we have to buy some new ones. We were lucky because I really needed the night time for the projector. So while all this was going on we still had hours to spare. I had to remind myself about that aspect. Once we got everything in order I had my students working together flawlessly. They kept themselves in check by making sure all lines were even and perpendicular.

After the grid was complete we had to play the waiting game because were going to project the image on to the wall using a high powered image projector.

My students were starting to understand what was happening. They saw why the grid was important and knew that the projected images needed to fit within certain squares. Armed with contractor crayons they went to the wall and started to trace the images. We had to do it in sections so part of the challenge was lining up the new projected image with the previously traced image. When you have this many people working together… the challenges we encountered were mere speed bumps. This evening was all about getting the grid up and attaching the image to that grid. My students are the best!

Filed under: Community Art- Eugene Or by admin Date 16 October, 2008