The Red Hunting Cap

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 ...

🎉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...

⚠️  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...

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...