Mural #49
Tilden Elementary
Hamburg, PA
Flowers #1,905 - #2,142 of 10,000
Install date: September 2022
Chapter 9… 20% there.
After finishing up at Perry, I headed 10 minutes down the road for our next big project, Tilden Elementary!
This was another big undertaking. Instead of just one installation, we worked on 3 murals at the same time. The first (and biggest) was on 31 pieces of plywood design with the plan of having it pieced together to form one 112 x 15 foot mural on the outside of the school next to the entrance. The second, and much more manageable, was a long mural down one large hallway outside the gym. The third was two cinderblock pillars right at the entrance of the school.
We kicked things off with some excitement. The sheets of plywood we had bought and stored months before had a tiny bit of moister trapped inside. So, over the course of a few months, that moisture only got worse. Luckily Mrs. Stoner, the Art teacher, and Mr. Worrell, the PE coach are fantastic and after a few phone calls and a quick team meeting, me had a game plan. We loaded up the sheets of plywood into Mr. Worrel’s truck and drove down to Home Depot where we were able to swap them out fresh, dry pieces.
Once we got back, we laid them out and I got to work sketching, painting, cutting and sanding. Since we couldn’t paint in the gym and the art room was on the second floor, we transformed one of the LGI spaces into a temporary mural workshop. It wasn’t big enough to lay out all of the panels at once but that was actually a silver lining. By the end of the week, after hundreds of students did their part, we had lined the space with finished painted flower panels, making the whole workspace super bright and fun.
During the panel workshop we also invited several classes to walk down the hall and help fill in the 2nd mural at the gym entrance.
After that, we got to work cleaning finishing off the panels as well as transform the plain white pillars into a funky flower bouquet.
This is a special mural as it is home to the 2,000th flower. 8,000 to go!
The job was almost done. There was still the least fun but very crucial final step of sealing all the panels with several coats of clear, waterproof sealer. Over the summer my dad ind I drove up several times to lay out the panels in the parking lot of the school and seal them up.
The mural is set to find its final form this fall when the panels will be installed infront of the school.
