Week 9 Fixing holes

Hi, and welcome back!

This week, I ran into a slight delay in the mural process. Originally, I had planned to begin priming the wall early Monday. Unfortunately, when I arrived, I found out that the primer would not be arriving until Friday. Although this slowed my timeline a bit, it gave me the opportunity to focus on another aspect of the wall that I had originally planned to leave alone to save time.

Filling in holes with concrete

Since I now had extra time, I decided to fill in some of the larger holes in the concrete wall. Conveniently, the school had extra concrete mix available for me to use. I came in Thursday morning to begin. Because this was my first time working with concrete, I spent some time beforehand researching how to properly mix and apply it. Mr. O’Neil also helped me get set up and gave me a brief demonstration before I began.

The process ended up going surprisingly smoothly. The concrete mix was simple to combine with water until it formed a putty-like consistency. I first filled in the two largest holes in the wall before deciding to fill in some smaller ones as well. I am currently letting the concrete dry and plan to return Tuesday to sand down the fill-ins and finally begin priming the wall.

Other Areas of Progress

Outside of the wall preparation, I also continued experimenting with different aspects of my mural design throughout the week. I explored the idea of changing the bear paw so that the palm would face upward. However, after researching reference photos, I could not find any examples of bears naturally making that motion. I even tried using my dog’s paw as a reference. I quickly realized that her paw could not rotate upward either. After doing a bit more research, I concluded that bears realistically cannot make that movement. Although I decided against changing the orientation completely, I did lower the paw slightly within the composition. I have also begun brainstorming different styles for drawing students, which I plan to integrate into the final design.

This week I also finalized part two of my materials list. I decided to use Chroma Mural Paints and plan to order them through Blick Art Materials, as they carried most, if not all, of the colors I needed for the mural.

Going Forward
Next week, I plan to work as efficiently as possible so that I can finally begin painting starting week 11.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned!