La Sierra 4, Painting Continues

NOT CRAZY about these pictures of me, but oh well.

La Sierra Mural 3, Painting Begins

PAINTING begins!

La Sierra Mural 2, Projecting the Image

THE WALL is clean and ready to paint white.

MERCEDIE Aquilera, Lupe Diaz and Julio Behena paint the wall. It's not dark yet. That's my beloved Little Giant ladder.

MERCEDIE was an amazing worker!

NEXT, using a black and white photo on clear acetate, we transfer image to wall with an overhead projector.


PHOTOS by Shirley Keller.

BACK tomorrow- Nadi

La Sierra Mural 1, Porterville, 8/09

THE STUDENTS of La Sierra High School, in Porterville, CA., painted this mural in 2009 with my assistance. I hope they had as much fun as I did. If you want to see how it was done, follow this blog for a few days. I'll walk you through it.

WITH THE HELP of Shirley Keller, a volunteer for the school, I met with the art students in the classroom. All students in the school would have an opportunity to paint, but we needed to meet with a core group to design the mural. They were surprisingly quiet and I had some difficulty getting them to open up. I spread out on a table an array of photos and clippings to give them ideas. They liked the idea of masks, and since Shirley and I both brought our cameras, we jumped right in and had them pose for masks. They wanted to include teachers and their principal, Jan Mekeel, so we photographed them as well.


I THINK they were starting to warm up.

I LIKED the photos we took, so I went home and, in Photoshop, created these 3-color images, cutting the tops off their heads to make them look like masks. I created a page in Photoshop the same proportions as the wall, put each mask on its own layer, then played around with a composition, dropping in a colorful background behind.

How Crow Became Black

I just love this 2009 mural I did with the students of Three Rivers Union School here in Three Rivers, Ca. It is a Yokuts story about how Crow became black. In the beginning, Falcon and Crow were the same color. Falcon wanted to change that. He told Crow to help him build a net of sticks and they carried it into the sky. When Night Sky came rolling in, she did not see the net, and was trapped in it. Falcon grabbed her and rolled her into a ball and rubbed her all over Crow. That is how he became the colors of night.
I painted the mural with about 200 children from Kindergarten through 8th grade. One class at a time came, about 20 kids in each class. While one half painted, the other half toured the Discovery West Museum. The youngest kids paint first, and as classes get older, the kids are able to add harder detail. We were finished in 3 days.