Conservation mural, start to finish

One of our projects with the high schoolers during summer camp was to design and create a mural about a community issue in Cajabamba. After brainstorming possible mural subjects, the kids chose conservation and protecting the environment as their theme. From there, we spent a few hours of class time free-drawing design ideas, eventually voting on which ones to include in the mural.

Two of our particularly artistic students volunteered to take the rough mock-up of the design we'd arrived at on the whiteboard and transfer it onto a single coherent sheet (which we would then grid so as to draw it onto the larger mural). When they came back to class the next week with a beautiful, fully-colored, posterboard-sized version of the design, we profesoras were (pleasantly) speechless at all the effort they'd put in:

In the meantime, Linnea, Jess and I had prepped the extremely ugly wall the school board offices had given us to paint (I'm sure their logic was "it can't get any worse!")

The next step was to draw the poster's deign onto the mural wall:

And then it was time to paint. Luckily our wall was only a couple blocks from my house, which gave us an easy solution for where to store all our paint gear. The beauty of being the teacher is that you have many adolescent minions to carry said gear for you :) The photo below shows our typical weekly parade between my garage and the mural:

Painting - how many high schoolers can you squeeze into a 2.5 meter space?

Within seven weeks, the whole thing was done! And now all of Cajabamba is reminded to take care of the environment every time they walk past the school board office, hooray!

The mural's slogan reads: "Nature is life, don't destroy it. If you conserve it, you'll conserve the future."