Girl Scout Mural

Lexi's Girl Scout troop has been working on their painting badge. This meant, I was involved. One of the options for the culminating project was to paint a mural.

So.. why not?

Here is what they did.  Isn't it so cute :)

 Really, it wasn't hard to do this. But is seems daunting to a lot of people, so here is a tutorial.

1. Take a picture of the group.

2. Using photoshop or another photo-editing software take out the background, and compress the photo into one layer.Then add the layers that you want to include. Notice that I have a number of typos in it.. I did fix the file prior to using it, but I guess I didn't save the corrected one.

3. Make a transparency. This might have been the hardest step as NOBODY makes transparencies anymore and I don't have the right kind of printer to do it at home.

4. Now, find one of those old fashioned overhead projectors and get a large piece of paper. I used a special heavy duty art paper called RendR from Crescent. It's a no show heavy paper on a roll. It's expensive, but worth it for a long-term project.

5. Trace the image.  Have your child proof your work. Thankfully Lexi noticed that the I had the troop number wrong! (That's why you use pencil!!)

6. Take it to the kids and have them paint themselves. Use solid colors. Can you imagine how chaotic the mural would be if I had let them try to give themselves faces and details. I had the girls use a special solid poster paint that doesn't make a mess!! It's called Playcolor. It's paint that dries in about 10 seconds... unless you use it really, really heavy.. then it takes 30 seconds.  I love how each girl is represented in a different color and that the colors blended when overlapped. We talked about how this was like making new friends :) !

I was sorry that two of the girls weren't there for the painting portion, but that's the way it works when you are dealing with kids. I decided that it was better to just get the mural finished without them.

After the meeting, I finished up the mural by adding a layer of black paint to the green text and outlining the girls and the logo.

Now all I have to do is go hang it in the hut!!