Construction Mural Sneak-Peek

Take a look at some of the progress made in class today on the West Village construction wall mural! After collaboratively, carefully and diligently placing, sizing/resizing, cutting/pasting, duplicating and collaging the insane amount of [hand-drawn!] source material, the students were able to combine their individual drawings into one, cohesive image to work from for when they begin painting. As you can see from the images, it was pretty amazing to witness the collage going from a seemingly endless pile of source material to the finished product. Of course, I was simply a bystander and not involved in the actual decision-making process, but from my perspective, this was a great way to get a feel for the way each student works individually and with one another, and the areas in which they strive artistically. While some students were cutting out different images or running up and down the stairs to make copies and re-size them, some went to the actual site to paint the light gray base coat on the wall, and others took on the role of positioning the images on the rather intimidating (if I do say so myself), long and empty white strip of paper on the wall representing the mural space, to scale.

Towards the end, all of the students seemed to have an active voice in the final touches of the collage--some even stayed after class to add some last minute touches or reposition images that were not quite working for them. This study took a lot of work, but it's sure to translate impeccably when blown up onto the actual wall--especially with the help of Ben Butler's drawing class! Both the mural painting and drawing class will be working together within the next few weeks to execute the mural, so be sure to walk by and take note of the progress! There will be photo and video documentation as well. There seems to be some rain headed our way within the next few weeks, but hopefully we can get out there soon to start painting! Alas, we cannot control the weather, nor can we allow it to get in our way, so until the rain stops the students will be dividing into three groups and busy working on the design for another potential mural.

The epic stack of source material...and that's probably not even half of it!
It is probably difficult to see the full quote that the students decided to spread across the entire mural from these pictures, but it is from a fragment of the Rhodes Prayer by Paul Tudor Jones, class of 1932: "May we always treasure the tradition of sound learning and humanitarian service into which we have been called at Rhodes College." The text adds a nice graphic element to the composition.
When creating this study, it was crucial to periodically step back and view the design from a distance in order to critique the composition as a whole, to see if it works as well from far away as it does up close. One of the challenges of this design was creating a unified scene that flowed nicely from section to section, be it through line or unifying motifs, like the quote, so it was important to do this throughout the process.

Erin even got in there to help out!
As you can see, this process was very much based on trial and error and efficient decision making, as much of the projects will be...