Paint Love// Collaborative Mural Project

I am so excited to be a part of Paint Love.  Paint Love's mission is" connecting artists and nonprofits for a positive impact on youth."  They help connect artists with organizations throughout metro Atlanta. Julie McKevitt, founder of Paint Love, is a dear friend of mine and a very talented artist.  She works hard to seek out and organize some amazing opportunities for artists to get involved in their community!

 Last month I worked with Paint Love to create a unique art experience for the students at Norton Park Elementary School.

We worked with 3rd and 4th graders as well as their awesome art teacher, Sabrina Barilone to create a collaborative mural using photographs of their school!You can also check out Paint Love's blog post about the project here

Before going to the school, I put together a few different photos of the school that Julie(founder of Paint Love) captured for us. In Photoshop, I layered some effects and colors to make the image fun for the students to paint!  We printed the image, and cut it up into a grid, giving each student a small section of the picture to enlarge on their canvas!

During our time there, we taught the students about the work of Andy Warhol, how to work from a grid, and mix paint!We had less than 2 hours with the group, so we were working fast!

 

Then it was time for the installation!

Woohoo! Some color for all of that space!!

Thrilled I had this amazing opportunity to get involved! If you are an artist interested in being a part of this organization, contact them!

bottle cap mural.

Bottle Cap Murals have become a unique way to create art for your school, and teach kids about helping the environment! An oak tree is our school symbol so we decided to use that as the inspiration for our mural.  My 60 Art Club students completed this in 5  2 hour club meetings.

 This project was originally inspired by this artist and my friend that did a bottle cap mural with her students!

STEP ONE: collecting the caps...
The students brought in somewhere over 24,000 bottlecaps ranging in size, shape and color. We had a competition between classes to see who could bring in the most! Then we washed and sorted them all by color in boxes.

STEP TWO:
 We used 2 pieces of plywood to create 1 8'x8' panel.  The tree was the only part where we chose to have paint under the caps, everything else  we let the natural wood show through. I assembled the 2 wood panels together with screws before we started adding caps, and we made sure not to cover the screws yet so I could undo it to transport it upstairs for its final installation.

 

STEP THREE: ADD CAPS! We filled in the tree first with just black tops and then drew lines in crayon so we would know where to put each color.

Here's how things progressed...

                    

AND THE FINAL PRODUCT.....