Wednesday, July 8, 2015

Tennis Mural

The tennis courts at one of the parks in my hometown were recently refinished- great!
 But next to the brand-spankin' new courts, was the ugly old practice wall. The Parks & Recreation Director and I talked about using it as a surface for a mural when I was in high school, but it never worked out. Once the courts were resurfaced, it was the perfect time to tackle the project. I came up with a plan, ran it by him, he bought the paint, and after the old boards were replaced with new plywood, I got started.
I spent Monday morning just drawing everything out. My dad helped me use his chalkline to snap the rays and the lines for the top of the net, then I tried to make a grid to draw out my plan. That was much trickier than I expected with the scale of the project- approximately 10x28 feet.
The next day I was ready for some help. Three wonderful ladies- Kathleen, Suzette, and Carol- from Jackson County Arts helped me throughout that week until we finished up Saturday morning.
The last step was adding the black lines to make up the net. The top of the net was the correct height so that it can be used to practice, but we took some liberties with the spacing on the net, enlarging it to 6 inch rows instead of 2 inches since there was not a realistic scale on the rest of the mural. I made a template- a 6 inch wide strip of cardboard with marks every 6 inches that we used to quickly lay out the knots. We were trying to figure out the best way to paint the lines and found that instead of connecting the dots with a brush, we could use string to print it! I cut a piece of cotton string from the hardware section a little longer than the height of the net. We poured paint in a foam tray, ran the string through the paint, and used it like a chalkline. I held the string in place and Kathleen snapped it, creating a line. The horizontal lines were just done in sections, using the painted knots as a guide.
We are pretty proud of the way the mural turned out and happy to have been able to contribute more art to our community.

3 comments:

  1. Really nice job! Your students will always think of you when they see this mural!

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  2. I love this. I wish I could have helped!!!

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  3. Look amazing! What a nice thing to do for your community!

    Learning at the Teacher Table

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