Short North Mural Walk

On January 22nd, we walked through the Short North photographing and discussing the murals we encountered before meeting up with Curtis Goldstein at Cup O' Joe. Some of the murals we looked at were "Trains" by Greg and Jeff Ackers, "Short North Gothic" by Steve Galgas and Mike Altman, and "Mona Lisa" by Brian Clemons (touched up by Curtis Goldstein). We discussed the importance of these murals to the community and how they influence the atmosphere of Columbus' Short North.

Mural Practice

This was some practice for creating an idea for our mural. Tyler, Angela and I created this idea.
The concept for this image is about sharing your thoughts and talents with the world, which is represented with the orange text and swirl.  The world has a tree, which represents nature, and a city, which represents community.  One of the roads leads to nature and one goes to the city. When both meet in the middle of the world, it represents the two coming together.

Mural Practice

This image was part of a visual brainstorming project I created with Charlotte, Sean and Craig. First, we all printed out images that related to the concept of community that we found on the internet and then passed the pictures around the classroom.  Everyone added drawings to the picture print-outs.  After that we split into small groups and made a larger scale of the composition we liked.  This is a picture where kids are holding up signs and are rooted into the ground.  We did not get to finish coloring so the kids look like floating octopi.

The Summit on 16th

This drawing shows the dimensions for our new mural site located at the Summit on 16th, which is a church and a youth center.  It is hand drawn by Chris Gardner.  We have been asked to create our mural on wood and attach it to the wall rather than painting directly on the bricks.  We are going to need a lot of wood for this mural.  If we are going to paint the whole wall, we are going to need enough wood to cover a 188*155 area.  We are also going to need wood for the three dimensional elements we are planning to incorporate into our mural.

Tagged Restroom

At Tuttle Park there is a restroom with a colorful assortment of rectangles painted on it.  This however is mostly covered by tags from graffiti artists.  On the backside is a graffiti tag from an artist named "Kringe" and on the other side there are tags from "Ender" and "Skum".  These names might be familiar to you because they can be found spray painted onto buildings, walls, and just about anything else all over Clintonville and Columbus.  While we looked at this graffiti in Tuttle Park, we had a conversation about how Philadelphia dealt with their graffiti problem.  They had graffiti artists from the community work on murals so there was a lower chance of defacement of the communities walls.  We also talked about our opinions on graffiti: useless vandalism of property or interesting art from the people and the difference between legal and illegal work.  

Mural Idea Drawing

We created this image during a brainstorming activity.  It is a drawing of a circle incorporating the shape of Ohio and the Graham school logo.  It also has a city, a forest and in the middle, a farm. There are two hands holding up Ohio/TGS logo.  If we had the time to finished coloring the hands, they would have been different skin tones to show that different races of people help the community survive.

Mural Practice

This was one of my first ideas for the mural.  In the beginning of Mural Project, we went to the library where we looked through books to help us think of an idea for the future mural.  We had no idea of where it was going to be painted, we hardly knew anything about murals, and we each had to come up with an idea.  My idea was a spherical view of the city with Polaroid pictures in the background of people in the community doing whatever they like to do.

Kringe

On one of our mural walks, we came across an abandoned rest room in Tuttle Park.  While a couple sides of it were colorful, there was one side that had been tagged by graffiti artists.  This graffiti was created by someone known as "Kringe".  It covered a wall about 20 feet long in black and white spray paint.  It covered a plaque that was dedicated to Clyde Tuttle, whom Tuttle Park was also named after.  We talked about how illegal graffiti can be destructive to the community.

Painting Practice

This practice mural was a test run to see how we work together.  Our advisory chose a couple of images that we would like to paint and then narrowed it down by voting on one.  We wanted to practice painting as well as practice working together.  It was a very hard task because it was a small space and none of us have worked together on a mural before.  We were trying to get everyone involved but some people didn't want to do anything.  At the beginning it was a little rough but towards the end mostly everyone was working and having a good time.  The final product is fairly good but the most important thing we were trying to accomplish was learning how to work together.  We had trouble with that but we keep practicing hoping to improve our communication skills so that we have a successful mural from start to finish.  This small practice mural was a preview of what is going to happen when we work the real mural.

Our New Wall

We have decided that this will be the new location of our mural.  It is located at the "Summit on 16th".  This new location benefits us in many ways.  We now have an indoor shelter where we can paint in case of rain and we can also store all of our supplies inside so that we do not have to carry everything back and forth from our location and school.  It will also be a safer place for us to work, it has storage and excellent options for lunch!  We will be painting on sheets of plywood and use concrete screws to attach our mural because the wall is brick.

Mural Practice

This drawing is something that we created as an idea for the mural were planing to paint.  It is a picture of a person leaning over and imagining holding the earth in his finger tips.  There is a city on the right and a tree on the left with a half-human, half-tree in the middle holding up a sign. The concept for this drawing is that the city and nature go together and they are connected by the tree-person in the middle.

Mural Concept by Sean and Charlotte

Charlotte and I worked on this drawing as an idea for our mural.  It has a person looking at the world and considering all the possibilities.  There is a tree in the shape of a fist and planets orbiting Earth.  There is also a city with trees and a sun behind it. 

Tuttle Park Mural

This mural is on the outside of an Ohio Parks and Recreation building in Tuttle Park.  We walked over and looked at this after looking the legal graffiti wall.  In the center of the image is a woman with tree roots instead of legs, which could symbolize mother nature holding the earth.  We decided we liked this symbolization for nature and have incorporated the idea of tree people into our own ideas for our mural.  There is a good balance on either side of this mural with night and day as well as city and forest.  The whole of the image is within the shape of a bird soaring.  This mural incorporates several interesting ideas into one solid piece, something which we hope to do in our own mural.

Tuttle Park Legal Wall

These pictures show legal graffiti wall located in Tuttle park.  On one side, there is  a mural of the Columbus skyline which is visible from the park. There is also two "wild style" tags and one outline.  I'm glad that even though it is a legal wall, most graffiti artists stayed away from the mural and used the other side for more tags. Even though there are a few tags on the mural, they are not going over any detail on the mural and it doesn't make the mural look bad.

The Last Mural Walk

On February 23rd, we took the COTA (Central Ohio Trasit Authority) bus from our school to High Street, where we took another bus after that to Town Street.  After we got off that second bus, we walked to Mount Caramel hospital.  On the wall of the hospital is a mural entitled "Dedication" painted by Eric Grohe.  Grohe painted this mural in a way that makes it appear three dimensional by using a technique called a "vanishing point".  The people are given a shadow to appear as statues, also known as a "drop shadow".  

We also saw two additional very long and large murals on this walk.  There were actually two sides to one of the murals, but my camera

couldn't capture it all at once.  The first two pictures below are on one side, and the last 3 pictures are show the other side.

At the end of our walk, we found a really cool mural that is seen from the highway that depicts the history of Columbus.  This mural is known as the "Franklinton Mural" and was created by Greg Ackers.