Mural Class!

I haven't had any time to post since I took this full time job out in Reno at Truckee Meadows Community College, but I'd like to update a bit of what has been happening.  When I took the job, they needed someone to take over the mural grant they had just won.  The grant called for a mural artist to teach a class, developing the mural from concept to finish.  I have mural painting experience from years ago, and have made some pretty big drawings recently, so it was a class I felt confident I could teach!  The site is in the main hall of the Student Center, sized 12 feet high X 45 feet long, in a heavy traffic area.  It is also the wall where the main campus art gallery is, as the grant writers wanted to emphasize its entrance and draw attention to it.

The first task with my 4 students was to brainstorm compositional elements.  The theme as the grant was written was to create a Nevadan Landscape.  I taught the students about the early stages of mural planning and development, and they taught me about the amazing and inspiring local landscape.  After bringing together numerous photographs, research, sketches and paintings of various elements, we built four of these mock-ups.  They are built to scale, based off of building blueprints and we drew and painted directly on them.  This is a way to easily plan the composition of such a huge project, as well as develop color structures, and deal with architectural elements that we had to work around.

The President of the College, who in the grant was to help dictate what the mural would have and would ultimately make the final choice, asked us for three compositions to choose from.  Instead of assigning a mock-up to each student, I had the students work collaboratively on developing them.  I did this so that as student's strengths and interests revealed themselves, I knew which ones I could assign major parts to as we went through these into the main execution.  I told students that this is where some of the most important work lied, as once the composition was set in form and imagination, it would make it easier to tackle the main mural.  We took our three best to meet with the President and her cabinet for final approval.  After a brief introduction I let the students do the presenting.  President Hilgersom and her staff absolutely loved what we had developed, and we took notes as they combined elements of the different ones they liked best.  With that, we were approved!

We were underway!  We took our compositional plans and applied them directly to the walls.  The students were surprised at how fast it started out!

 












We worked until the end of the semester developing the major compositional elements.  I taught mural painting techniques as we went, and have helped quite a bit with the painting.  Now in the the Spring semester of 2018, we will continue work, hopefully making our plan for a big reveal with a formal lighting in late March!