City Mapping: Creative Methods
On our third day of our weekend--the second and last day for completing our public art piece--we set out strong painting in the spaces for our text and our individual portraits.
Some simple forms and patterns were added in the background.
Our composition sketch
We created black shapes that would serve as backgrounds for the text, giving a feeling of a flowing river. We assigned sizes of shapes to the lengths of the lines of poetry.
We readied our stencils and painted our silhouette stencil first with a beige ground. The flesh-like color helped to separate our portraits from the background, and to help the upcoming dark brown facial details to stand out.
Everyone fit their portraits in a horizontal line near the bottom of the composition. This line, for us, represents a confident group at a lower horizon, above which our dreams and imaginative lines of poetry float above our heads.
The pillars in front of our mural were utilized by priming them all black and using their edges as placement for the title of our mural and poem. "In Our Tomorrow" was painted in white on the two frontal edges of both pillars to put the idea behind our work foremost in viewers' eyes--when walking on the street towards the mural from either direction.
We moved onto stages of filling in our black shapes with our lines of poetry. First, we laid track lines of sorts with chalk for our hand writing to follow--to avoid the text looking to crowded, unbalanced, or illegible. We hand wrote our lines of poetry with paint markers.
We started laying in the dark brown facial details with our second/top stencil. We used sponges to control the paint within the cut out spaces.
Our group started to grow in the mural right before our eyes, and we were able to visualize the end goal.
We finished our inspirational public art piece, "In Our Tomorrow," in less than two days' time! Talking while working, we all seemed to share how pleasantly surprised we were by our fruitful efforts over the past two days. We reflected in a discussion setting after the project upon the challenges of the weekend, and how we could better facilitate groups we might support in bringing creative messages to their city. We discussed the successes of the weekend and efforts we thought worked well throughout the process: Mostly, it was helpful that we all recognized each others' skills, and encouraged each other to work in the areas we might do best. We pulled the beautiful and meaningful mural together successfully and quickly because we supported each other, and worked as a team. Needless to say, we were very proud of each other in the end!
The proud group.
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