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 tradition)

Our design for the rock was actually like a two second spontaneous idea made up during a chem class. During that class, SP and AT asked me (Amelia, Yana was at home dying from some mysterious illness) about what we were going to do with the rock. As I was thinking about it, I drew three cubes (because I decided that rocks = cubes) and then decorated each with its own design: one was a mountain range which was really cool on paper but would probably not work on a rock, one was a space/galaxy theme which was also pretty interesting but wouldn’t have matched our Wayland colors (orange and black), and the last one was a cityscape with an orange sunset in the background. After we both gave it much deep thought and discussed it in an open-debate style conversation (i.e chatted about it at lunch) we decided to go with the cityscape design. Fortunately, it received approval from our class vice president and semi-approval from our class president. Lesson learned: spontaneity can be a great thing

Fast forward a couple of months later to this week. The janitors were cleaning out the english wing of the school which meant that we couldn’t work on our mural. However, fate can be a great antidote to procrastination, and the english wing being closed gave us a chance to finally start painting the rock. When we actually got in front of the rock, we realized two important things: 1. The surface is not smooth, and 2. The rock is not a perfect cube. i.e. things we definitely should’ve thought of before. Luckily, it was easy enough to make adjustments to our two-second design and with the aid of some high-tech equipment - umbrella for shade, gloves for protection from ~toxic paint~, and Amelia’s snazzy hat - we made good progress after the first day of work. Unfortunately, despite the aforementioned high-tech equipment, Yana ended up with a sunburn and I got a tan, so you tell me whose skin is better. Anyways, here’s what the rock looked during day 1:

We were aiming to finish painting the whole thing in one day, but productivity is not exactly one of our super-strengths, so we had to come back a second day to paint the city. Here’s what it looked like after day 2:

(We also painted lights, windows, etc. later on but it was too dark to take a photo at that point)

Because we decided to paint mostly during the day (moonlight didn’t seem like an effective light source), there were a lot of visitors who stopped by to see what we were doing. There was a guy who said he lived down the street and who brought his baby, Gustav, to look at the rock; there was a woman who was walking her dog, Eli, and came over to chat with us about her kids who also used to go to Wayland High; there was a group of sports people (nicknamed “the wellness bros”) who drove by and honked in support; there were hordes of parents picking up kids from a nearby summer camp who drove by and slowed down just enough to inconspicuously stick their head out the window; there was even a family who drove all the way to the school so they could talk to us for a few minutes about what it was like to paint the rock and how we chose our design. And they brought their dog. All in all, it was an interesting experience and we met a lot of new people from Wayland who we probably would’ve never talked to otherwise. I guess in a small town like this, rock painting is a pretty big deal.

Now back to our regularly scheduled program...