How nice to be back at
Brillo de Sol! This special school for kids with special needs means a lot to
me, so it’s always a pleasure to be able to make their learning space a bit
more joyful. This time we decided on a mural in the corridor upstairs and we
worked with a great team! There was Judy Sadlier, who sponsors a student at the
school, her friends Gwynn Thoma and Debby Pate. We also had help from Cristian
Rápido, Judy’s scholarship student.
No one really believed
me when I said we can do a 18.65 meter wall in just two days, but of course we
could The theme was based on the names of the classrooms: Universe, Forest and Metamorphosis. For the Universe part I picked
a famous illustration from the Little Prince because it depicts a universe, for
one, but also an erupting volcano. And, in case you didn’t know, the author,
Antoine de Saint Exupéry, crashed his plane at the capital’s airport in 1938
and spent some time recovering in Antigua. Is that
were the volcanoes on the little Prince’s planet come from?
The work went well,
starting with the background for the Universe part. Then we moved on to the
background for the Forest part, adding layer
over layer of trees to create depth. A few deer and a scarlet macaw later and
the forest was done.
The Metamorphosis
classroom used to be the library and that’s what I had in mind when I made the
design, but that turned out to be no problem at all. I had designed it with a
stack of books (not irrelevant for a high school classroom) and a butterfly. I
just added the life cycle of a blue morpho butterfly on a blank page of the
open book and the reference to “metamorphosis” was a fact.
So, two days later of
hard labour and the job was done! The school is running out of walls to paint,
but luckily, there’s still a few awaiting a transformation.
Thanks so much Judy,
Gwynn, Debby and Cristian for helping out (and sponsoring) and Ilene Kradin
too, who was unfortunately unable to help paint, but helped out with the not unimportant
financial part. Thanks to the Brillo de Sol staff for attending us so warmly
and the kids for the positive feed back. I hope to be back soon!
And maybe, -just maybe-, the next mural will be of a boa costrictor that just swallowed an elephant...
