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The Golden Hour

So, as we previously mentioned, we’ve finally finished the mural -- a bittersweet ending. We won’t lie, it was not an easy project. It feels like we’ve spent a majority of our summer vacation at the school. We’ve had to spend a lot of money. We’ve been really tired. We’ve had to plan a lot (something that is definitely not our strong suit). On our final day, we started working at 1:00 and stayed until 12:30 in the morning trying to finish. And we haven’t even cleaned up yet, which will be a process in and of itself. But it’s there, isn’t it? It stands tall, it doesn’t look half bad, and we’ve had a real adventure doing it. We learned how to brew tea in the English office. We finally had our picnic. We tried to watch the sunset a bunch of times and just happened to miss it each time. We saw KR. We met Gustav. We even bumped into Ryan and his dog Luther on our last day. And when we finished yesterday, it really didn’t feel like the end. This process - going to an empty school, painting ...
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Museum of Finer Things

We deeply apologize for the long break. Hopefully things have not been too rough for our readers without an update from us. So there’s not really much to say, I just felt like we were in a desperate need for a new blog post. In art-related news, I visited the MFA yesterday. Unfortunately we could not go together because one of us refuses to go with the other. The MFA has always been a kind of wonderland for me. But this time there was something melancholic about the place. Might’ve been the weather, but every painting seemed like it held a lot of sadness or wistfulness or nostalgia or something. Or maybe it was just me, projecting my thoughts onto history. The impressionism section has always been my favorite, and it still is, but this time around I spent almost all of my time in John Singer Sargent’s room. I don’t think I’ve ever really appreciated how fluid or effortless his painting seems. And it’s not really about technique or precision or even whatever the message may be behin...
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The Mail and the Mailman

Hello again, This post was actually written quite a while ago, but we couldn't find the time to publish it. We figured it's still a nice memory to save on our blog, but please imagine that it's a cold yet sunny New England morning on November 3rd while reading this. Also, sorry in advance if this post is a little rambling. There's no moral or meaning to this story; these are simply observations from a good, exercise-filled day. November 3rd: We just turned in our college apps and decided that today would be a fun day. Unfortunately, we actually got a lot of schoolwork assigned so we could not make it as fun as we had originally planned.  Like most others, the day began with a chore: we had to go to the gallery and take down all of the October artwork to make room for the new exhibit which will be hung up in November. After those exciting fifteen minutes, we were going to go explore the graveyard near my house. We’ve been planning to go for a long time (thi...
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Brain Breaks

Disclaimer: We started taking brain breaks this summer during our muraling days, so I figured they were related enough to art to include on this blog. Because of the way our schedules worked out, when we were painting the mural this summer, we would come in to paint for whole days at a time rather than a couple of hours per day. Even though we both love art, painting a wall for hours and hours can get exhausting. You’re standing up on a table, painting the same square piece of wall with its 5th layer of purple and pink paint and things just start to blur together: you start losing track of time, you start forgetting where you wanted to paint the clouds, you start questioning why you chose the colors you did, or even why you chose to paint the mural in the first place. To solve this problem, we started taking something called “brain breaks.” Brain breaks are by no means a new concept (just google it, there’s tons of suggestions), but for us specifically, brain breaks meant puttin...
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Do Not Use, Try Other Door

Hello, it’s us again, bogged down with AP Bio homework and the weight of college applications. On the bright side, we got an article written about the mural, here it is below (Shoutout to Joyce Wu and WSPN (of which I am the number 1 fan and probably only consistent reader)): https://waylandstudentpress.com/79664/articles/students-splash-life-into-english-wing/ Ok exciting story time: Yesterday we were supposed to meet some people from the Family Promise Metro-west program to take photos of their kids, which we will later turn into portrait drawings to hand out during the holidays. The address we had for the meeting was 6 Mulligan St., which, in case you’re not a Natick geography buff, is this big red church called St. Patrick’s church. We got to the church at around 6:20 just as the sun was setting (there was this really pretty pink/orange/indigo sunset, pictures below), but when we walked up to the main entrance, the door was locked and everything inside was dark and empty...
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The Gallery

Hello again, We have another mural update. JK, there’s really nothing left to say about the mural, so now we’re going to talk about all the other random (but mostly art-related) things happening in our lives. For example, this summer we became members at our town’s art gallery (theW Gallery in Wayland, check it out!), or, more specifically, we became chairs on the gallery board and are now in charge of running the student program/curating the student exhibit of the gallery. We were pretty psyched about doing this, but (obviously) we ran into some issues at first: Even though we’ve been working with with the gallery over the summer, because their entire board had to agree on how the “student exhibit” of the gallery would run, we finalized the whole curating process pretty recently. As a result, we couldn’t get as many pieces as we wanted to from other art students at our school. We only had about 12 pieces to hang up on Friday, but hopefully we'll get more in the couple of week...
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Clean up

Scraping paint off a wall is about as exciting as watching paint dry on a wall, especially if you’re scraping it off with your fingernails. Let us explain. School started a couple of weeks ago and during the first week of school, Ms. Snow approached us to “discuss the mural.” After congratulating us on our artistic accomplishments, she respectfully inquired as to why the paint was not only on the mural part of the wall, but also on the wall part of the wall. Unfortunately, we had no choice but to admit the truth: we did not tape everything around the mural while we were painting. To clarify, we really did try our best. The tape, however, only covered the section of the wall directly touching the mural, and the parts a little further away were left open to brutal attacks from splatter painted stars and dripping paint globs.  Shockingly, our accidental vandalism of school property didn’t go over too well with some of the authority figures, so we were asked to--wait for it--...
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The Finish Line

🎉WE FINALLY FINISHED THE MURAL!!! 🎉 After months of work, we have finally crossed the finish line. While we'll definitely write another blog about this - one with all the gory details, "deep" thoughts, and reminiscing about the past, present, and future - for now, we thought we could just show you the whole mural-creation process, from the very beginning to the very end, through photos.  Disclaimer: Amelia is obviously heavily featured in the photos while Yana is no where to be found, but it's ok because by now that's the norm and, to quote Amelia, "the camera is Yana's and therefore I cannot take as many pictures." First thoughts: The sketch: The write-up: Being selected: Re-drawing the sketch with the correct proportions to the wall: Gridding the sketch: Gridding the wall: Drawing out the sketch on the wall: Figuring out budget for supplies: Buying supplies: First attempt at...
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A New Project

⚠️  Caution: this post is not about the mural, so proceed at your own risk.  ⚠️   Don’t worry, we’re not abandoning the mural (even though we haven’t posted in a while, oops), but this week we’re writing about painting the rock that we mentioned in a previous blog post. To recap: A while ago, members of the student council, SP and AT, asked us to paint the rock for our graduating class. “The rock” is this big boulder in the center of our campus, and it’s basically the first thing everybody sees when they drive towards the school. It was a gift to the high school from the class of 2014, and every year since, the graduating class has chosen a few - in this case two - people to decorate the rock for the entire grade. It’s one of those nice hometown traditions all the “locals” know about, so it was cool to be asked to participate. Here’s what the rock looked like before we painted it: (Pouring paint on top of the rock at the end of the year is another fun little tradi...
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Tant Pis

Hello again. Every day we’re making progress on the mural, and by now we’re approximately a half of the way done-ish. Yesterday, Ms. Snow emailed us about the mural, which she recently saw, and was very posh and very British about it: “ The blue/ red skyline has translated most felicitously from your sketch to the wall, and the white childish figures are full of motion.” She also told us “Tant Pis” about the fact that we paid the sales tax on the 200$ worth of mural supplies even though the school should technically be exempt. Yana didn't realize that Tant Pis were actual words, even though Amelia tried to tell her exactly what it meant → that is regrettable, too bad. Classic miscommunication. Anyways, here’s a few more crucial updates on mural/ life progress.  1. Stars make everything better. The top half of our mural is supposed to be a galaxy (or at least galaxy inspired), which took us a little too long to figure out how to actually make. The final technique we settled on: A s...
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