The Wave of GCE

For the third action project in If These Walls could talk for Elective Term, we had to create and install a mural in our new space. All of the action projects in this class have been leading up to this moment. The other two were simply preparation for the installation of the mural. This unit did not have an internal or external because we needed all of the time to create these murals. We had to use the image that we had created in the previous project and blow it up to scale so it would fit on our set wall in the new space. There were a lot of challenges my group faced starting with not being able to get into the space when we originally thought we would be able too. This caused us to change our entire idea. We originally wanted to paint directly on the wall but with this setback, we had to paint on paper then eventually wheat paste it onto the wall. I am very pound of how our paintings turned out and I know they will look very good once they are put up onto the wall.


Our mural is titled “The Wave”. The mural is a huge wave crashing into a boat. The wave represents traditional high schools and the boat represents GCE and how we are overcoming the conventional high school's’ mission and style of teaching. For this mural, we decided to use acrylic paint, soft gel glossy medium, stencil, and spray paint. Our space is right in the entrance, there are four panels on the wall that we have to fill with our image. Since we couldn’t get into the space right away, we had to cut and trim sixteen pieces of butcher paper and then tape them together in three groups of four. To get the image onto the paper we had split our image into sixteen equal parts and traced the image onto the paper. We then painted the image with the colors we created so it could be hung on the wall. Our color scheme mimics the ocean. We used blues, greens, and whites for the main part and then we used gold spray paint for the boat. We mixed all of those colors together to create the perfect color for the sky, the wave, and the foam of the wave. I think this mural will transform the space because our main goal was to show how GCE is as a community and how we are overcoming the way traditional high schools run. We have decided to put our mural right in the entrance so it’s the first thing everyone will see when they walk into the space everyday. I think that the mural will enhance the space by giving it a sense of community. The boat in the image is representing us as a school and how we are overcoming the traditional way of teaching. I think that it will give an essence of nature with the way the skylight works with the water and the lighting will reflect off the colors to make the room seem brighter. I feel like this mural will make a very big impact on the students because it will let everyone see let everyone see that even though we are still a small school, we are making a huge impact.

The roles that I claimed were documentarian, director of operations, artistic director, and mule. Each person in my group had a different role every day. My favorite role was either documentarian or the director of operations. I was good at documenting because I really enjoy taking pictures and my phone also lets me take time lapse videos which will be a very cool addition to the resulting video. I didn’t really enjoy being a mule because the point of that job is getting what everyone needs but I was always so focused on the mural so I would be too busy to drop what I was doing to go get something. If I could change anything about the process it would be having more time in the space. Once we found out that we wouldn’t be able to get into the space, it was a major setback which caused us to have to change how we will create the mural. Instead of painting directly on the surface, we had to paint on large panels of paper which we will wheatpaste onto the designated wall space. I feel like the mural won’t look exactly how my group had envisioned it to look because we originally thought it would be painted directly on the wall rather than painted onto paper which was pasted to the wall. Even though it’s set back, we worked through it and I think that it will still look good. Our mural has still not been put up due to problems in the space but we are hoping it will be up soon.