Once the students finished researching and drawing a variety of native crops and migratory species of butterflies that live in Wisconsin, we (Gabi and Jenie) got together to collage them together into a final composition.
Our goals:
creating a design that reflected our collaborative effort and unified our styles in one beautiful composition
creating a plan that made good use of the space and was practical for our supplies budget and time frame. We estimated 4 painting days and $800 for the mural supplies. You can see the breakdown of our supplies here.
Here is the final mock-up of our mural. Now we were ready to get supplies and start painting.
The students’ and instructors’ drawings collaged together in Photoshop for the final design, to be 12 x 30 feet.We divided the design into 24 5×3 foot panels, the size of the cement boards we would be using. The plan was to set up a workflow with a projector for each of the panels and then space on the ground and floor to finish painting and detailing each panel.Final text design by Jenie Gao. We came to a consensus on the words, “Our Stories Share the Same Roots,” to drive the message of our mural.Photoshop mock-up of the location and scale of the mural once installed on the building.
Our top question: How do you create an image to match your image with your message?
Our goal for our students and curriculum:
to learn how to dissect and image
to learn how to work backwards from a goal, to find the right images to represent your concept
Breaking Visual Problem Solving into Workshops
The “practical” side: Image Composition
1 workshop focused on Image Composition. We studied examples of different techniques artists used to weight or draw the viewers’ focus through the piece. We created our own compositions from still life objects. Each student received two objects to use as reference and had to try and come up with a composition that conveyed an “opposite” sense of what the object was. How do you draw a feather to look heavy? A small bauble to look large? A stable, symmetrical container to look off balance?
Here are some of the results.
Drawing using a a sunflower and eagle brooch for reference, by Isabel Castro.Drawing of a jar on the edge of the table, by German Vasquez.
The “creative” side: Image to Concept
We did a number of different exercises and games to flex our creative skills, including:
Studying how different murals have incorporated the wall itself into the design
Researching different subjects related to our theme of immigration.
We ultimately chose to incorporate different migratory butterflies and crops that are grown in Wisconsin into our final imagery.
Our list of different migratory species of butterflies and crops that grow in Wisconsin.One of the students’ thumbnail sketches of different possible compositions.A composite sketch by student Isabel Castro of crops grown by different cultures in Wisconsin, with different roots.
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