Breena Bard (@breenabardcomics) came up with the idea for a Mural at Lent Elementary. For a year, her and Julien Roohani worked on the permits. It was around this time I joined their committee and began helping with a grant application to the Regional Arts and Culture Council (RACC) for a few thousand dollars. The mural is almost 10 feet high and 164 feet long. None of us had painted a mural before and probably that was for the best as we didn’t know how much work it would be.
This was how I learned the mural process. There was much more to it than painting a wall.
I wasn’t involved in the permit process, thankfully. I don’t think I would have the patience.
Grant process: The grant was from RACC and was available to anyone. We worked out a budget and asked for the maximum amount ($5000). Many of the questions were pretty hard to answer. I was in contact with a mural painter at the time, and asked him to go through some of the questions with me. He knew very well what the committee was looking for. We related as much as we could to the community element of the mural, and how kids would see it every day they were at school. It made sense, but we needed someone else with experience to help us figure it out.
Fundraising: The PTA at the school organized some dine-out nights to raise money for the mural. We were able to get some extra funds this way.
Bureaucratic stuff: The Mural Committee had meetings with the principal a couple of times. She said she liked the idea of a mural, and was very friendly and seemingly enthusiastic when we met with her. That was about the extent of her support, however. She also thought we should use handprints of the children in the design, which struck me as overbearing. For reasons that weren’t clear to me, we also had to have one meeting and multiple interactions with a team from PPS. Even after it became clear there would be absolutely no conflict with any other renovation project at the school, we had to pretend this was some complicated operation that required something substantial on their part. We did need someone to come and unlock the gates for us in the weekends so we could let volunteers in, but apparently it was outside of their wheelhouse.
Organizing volunteers: This was an ongoing thing throughout the project. Much of it was word of mouth. The PTA put it in the announcements that we were looking for volunteers. We also had some people that heard about it through social media and wanted to help. Part of the budget was for refreshments.
Powerwashing the wall: This was just me and another parent. Somehow we had found out that he had a power washer. I don’t even remember if someone opened the gate for us, though I don’t think he would have clambered over the chain-link to get onto school grounds. As I remember, he seemed to be looking for a way out of it as soon as he showed up. He didn’t bring any hoses, and was surprised I didn’t know this. Whoever he told didn’t tell me. I live close to the school, and I brought hoses from home, figuring we would have enough. As he began, it became clear the hose wouldn’t be long enough. He saw his chance to leave, and I had to ask him to keep going as far as the hose wouldn’t let him. Meanwhile, I called someone on the PTA garden committee, who at the time I sort of knew, and asked in a panicked voice if he knew where a hose was I could use. There was one in front of the school hidden behind a shrub, and I was able to get it back to the schoolyard just as the other parent was about to call it a day. I said “Hey, we’re going to make a video about the mural process, do you want to be in some photos?” That got him back into it…he had a certain charisma in spite of it all, and really got into posing for the photos. All this for something that is maybe not even necessary for a mural.
Priming the wall: We painted the wall white. It was our first event with multiple volunteers, and we had maybe six people helping. We had long handled rollers, and brushes for the little indentations. The wall is made of cinder blocks, which are not really as smooth as one would hope. It’s also debatable whether priming is also really necessary for a project like this. But it did serve the purpose of getting us familiar with the surface we were working with.
The doodle grid: This is difficult to explain, at least when I told anyone about it. In order to really understand, you need to be somewhat familiar with digital art making. Let’s begin: the design for our mural existed as a file. It was the same proportions as the wall the mural would be on. On the actual wall, we painted a series of random lines and squiggles that filled most of the space, while leaving some amount of white between them. This was the doodle grid. Next, someone took a picture of the actual wall with the doodle grid. It’s the next part that confuses people who haven’t worked with digital art or photo apps much. Basically, we superimposed the design file over the actual picture of the wall, and reduced the opacity of the design file so we could see the doodle grid through it. This combined file then showed the where the design interested with the underlying doodle grid patterns. This gave us our guide of where to paint the outlines on the wall. This technique makes it easier to make the what is painted on the wall reflect the intended design. Otherwise, it’s pretty hard to know where you are when you’re up against a wall, although I’ve heard some people do have that spatial awareness. This is only one method. Some people also use a projector, but that wasn’t a great option for us due to the length of the mural. We made all of the lines with spray paint, and kids helped as well as adults. None of the doodles we painted were in black, for reasons I’ll go into in the next section. It was a way for everyone to get out any tagged impulses they had had over the course of their lives, no matter how old they were.
Breena was thinking of taking out the central leopard and replacing it with a leopard face to simplify the design. I insisted we had to keep the full leopard in the design. “It’s your legacy, Breena” to which she scoffed. But she did keep it in, and later thanked me for taking a stand on it. It really did bring it together.
The outline (chalk): We then had another volunteer event with a muralist we paid to help us. She had an iPad and consulted the file showing the design superimposed over the doodle grid. By looking at where the doodle grid intersected with the design outlines, she could see where to put the outlines of the design in chalk.
Painting the outline: Following behind, volunteers painted over the chalk in black. As none of the doodles we painted lines were in black, they stood out quite well. It was a long and exhausting day, but we did get to the end, though some of our things would have to be touched up a bit throughout the process. Still, we had our giant coloring book up on the wall.
More bureaucratic fun: We were emailing people to unlock the gate so people could come in and volunteer on the mural on the weekends. Getting the gate unlocked was somehow a challenge, and there was only one guy willing to come help us with it. At some point, they gave us a key to the lock and we were able to get in and out ourselves. There was some special trick to getting the lock on that took me almost 40 minutes to figure out.
Coloring in the outlines: It was time for the main part of the project, in that we were going to involve the whole school in painting in the mural outlines. For this, we brought in Yathzi Turcot (@yathzi.turcot). Fortunately, she was a teaching artist and had actually done stuff like this before. It was really just luck that I had found her. East PDX Collective had put up an art installation in the empty storefront on 92nd and Foster. It was sea-inspired art made from recyclables, lit up with strings of lights. One night I was walking by and saw Jean Fang, who ran it. I’d volunteered for EPDX before and thought I’d say hi. Yathzi was inside chatting with her, and maybe getting ready to disassemble a full-size mermaid she had made for the show. I was talking about the mural project, and from that it came out that Yathzi would be interested. Also, she is from Mexico, and the school we were painting the mural at is Spanish Immersion. As half of the kids speak Spanish at home, Yathzi was a perfect fit. She would prove to be both indispensable and dedicated. This entry may seem like an aside, but it illustrates those circumstances that lead to good outcomes on artistic projects. I like art, I went in to see someone I know in an art space, I met someone who became key to an art-related project I was involved with. It all seemed like such good luck and happenstance at the time, and it was. But there is also another element of intention setting up those circumstances. This isn’t some kind of step that can be integrated into a workflow, or that I would want to. It’s just one of those things to be aware of when trying to put something like this together.
Having the art classes come out and help: The most demanding part of this process was having each and every student come out and help paint the wall during their art class. This took two days for the full rotation. Every 45 minutes, we had a new group of kids coming out to help us. It was Breena, Julien, me, Yathzi, and another volunteer managing one wave of kids after another. There was also a substitute art teacher, who was physically present, though her spirit flew free elsewhere. You would think the older kids would have been the best painters, but there must be some kind of burst in confidence around 4th and 5th grade which is not commensurate with a gain in skill. The best painters were the 2nd and 3rd graders, who took it very seriously. Sometimes so seriously they didn’t want to leave. I think this is what the teacher did. The highlight of this part of the project was when my daughter’s class came out to paint and I got to paint with her.
Touching up: We had another volunteer day or two with other parents, who painted a bit more seriously. We filled in spots which had been missed, and fixed the outlines of items in the design. There was also dog, a book, and a microscope which were barely recognizable. Massive amounts of pink and yellow went into the letters.
Convincing ourselves it was done: Breena, Yathzi, and I became a regular presence at the school. I had contracted pinkeye from the art class days at the school. I wore my sunglasses even when signing in for my volunteer badge so no one would see my Quasimodo-looking face. It went from one eye to the other, swelling the lid almost shut on one side, and as it healed, the other side. I still showed up to paint. It was impossible to get it perfect…it was cinder blocks, and it went on forever. It was never meant for people to stand a foot away and look for imperfections. I devised the “picnic table” test. There was a picnic table 150 feet away from the wall. I said we needed to go over to the picnic table and see how it looked from there. It looked great. Finally we were able to move past our perfectionist impulses and admit we were done.
Removing the first tags: Except we weren’t. That was a lie. There was also maintenance. There is a backstory to these tags, which I think is related. While we were working on the mural, a child at the school died. It was as tragic as you could imagine. Some kids in his class tried to paint his soccer jersey number on the mural, and we had to paint over it. They would even try again when we were taking a lunch break on the days when we were touching up at the school. We learned the brushes and paints had to be guarded while the kids were outside. We asked the school if the family wanted us to put something in the mural, or not. It took a long time to get an answer, because no one wanted to pressure them. Eventually, they said they would like his first name and soccer number somewhere. We chose to put it in the soccer ball. The school counselor or psychologist was involved, and she cleared it along with the principal. I was chosen to paint it because I had taken a lettering class not long ago. While this was going on, we were in a running game of emailing the principal and asking if we could have an unveiling of the mural of sorts, perhaps on a night when the school was having an event. As part of our grant proposal, we were actually required to do so. We never received a response from the principal, maybe because we didn’t do her handprint idea, although it seemed to be some deeper issue we could never figure out. Neither the principal nor the vice-principal ever came out to look at the mural while we were working on it. Then, we woke up one morning to an email from the school counselor or psychologist (I can’t remember which) saying kids are having emotions about seeing the name in the soccer ball and so they might be sad about this. This was a school-wide email introducing the mural to the parents. Basically the first thing they heard about the mural was that it made the children sad. It was infuriating. Shortly after, towards the end of the school year, little tags showed up on the mural. They weren’t tags like you might see under an underpass. They size made me think it was kids from the school. We painted over them. It made us realize we needed an anti-graffiti coat sooner rather than later. We also got a new principal who thought it was a great idea for us to hand out free churros at the fall event called Dia de los Ninos. The other principal and vice-principal both resigned and have never been heard from again. I am relaying all of this because one should know that an art project of this size will probably run into some problems like this that aren’t financial, bureaucratic, artistic, logistical, or otherwise. I don’t know what you call this, but it wasn’t nice to be anyone involved in that.
Applying the anti-graf clear coat: This was an oddly anti-climactic end to the actual work on the mural. We got buckets of an anti-graf slop to put over the mural, We had a couple die-hard volunteers with us, and it went relatively quickly. I think it was less than an hour. The anti-graf slop looked like milk, and it went on clear, so it was hard to tell if it was doing anything. I haven’t seen any tags on the mural since then though, so I’d like to think it did something.
Community celebration: As required by our grant proposal, we had a community celebration. As I said, it was handing out churros. This had been my personal mission, and I had formed the churro sub-committee as a result. As the chair and sole member, it was up to me to find hundreds of churros for the celebration. Don Bigote came through. Then we handed them out, along with mural inspired magnets which I have about 30 of. Giving out free churros inspired a frenzy. One kid came back over and over, and I kept count just as a game for myself. He was in the high teens before we ran out.
Mural Complete!