Under the Sea Mural at Calibishie Primary School

A fellow Peace Corps volunteer, Abby, invited me to stay in her village of Calibishie and help her and her students paint a mural in the Calibishie Primary School library. I was thrilled as I love creating murals with children and I have been wanting to visit Calibishie---which is located on the Northern end of the Island of Dominica. Abby spent much of the last year revamping and organizing the primary school library and the library has really blossomed because of all her hard work.

Here is a "before" picture which Abby took :

But when I arrived---due to Abby's and the communities and the school's hard work----the library looked like this! some bright paint and organization had transformed it....

 I began the mural by showing the children how to draw a simple fish, then I gave them paper and pencils and asked them to draw a fish that filled the whole page. Then I cut out each fish with scissors and traced around each fish to create the mural's lay out.

some children watch as I cut out their fish....

here Abby is tracing the design onto the wall--using old fashioned carbon paper---then she is outlining the traced fish with a black sharpie

Once the design was all traced onto the wall--we began painting. Two of the older girls helped me to paint the murals---they both were very good at painting the details--and details were not easy to paint on these bumpy concrete walls. We chose bright Caribbean colors for the fish to continue to brighten up the library. I asked for primary colors and mixed all the colors we used from red, blue, yellow, lime green, and white.

 We were all very pleased with the finished murals---we ended up with three nice murals painted on the panels between three windows.

the children drew the fish, and I added the diving boy and other details....

the children drew all these wonderful fish and the crab, I added the jelly fish and the bubbles....

the last panel was left partially finished as we ran out of time--but Abby and her students will finish painting it....all the fish and the sea turtle were drawn by the children.

I love the ingenuity the children showed when they drew their fish, like the teeth the little boy added to this one.

Each fish was unique!

I had a blast working on this project with Abby and the children at her school and thoroughly enjoyed my 3 day stay in the beautiful village of Calabishie.

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Cards, cards, and more cards...

The 6th graders have been helping to make dozens of cards which the school will eventually sell in their new gift shop. St. Luke's Primary School has a nice museum which attracts tourists during the tourist season and we will be marketing our arts and crafts and other goods to the tourists when they visit the museum to raise much needed funds for the school. The gift shop is just about finished and will be opening soon !

We used a variety of techniques to create the cards---here designs are stamped on painted paper. I made some "rubber stamps" using plastic bottle caps and sheets of craft foam with adhesive on one side (sent to me by my daughter--bless her heart). The kids really liked playing with the stamps, and made some very pretty cards....

This card was created by first painting some colorful paper, then weaving solid colored strips into the painted paper.

You can see the variety of cards the students created here...all unique and colorful!

This card was made by rubbing colored chalk around a cut out shape of cardstock. I sealed the chalk rubbings with hairspray since I couldn't find any spray fixative here--the hairspray worked just as good as the expensive fixative. Necessity is indeed the mother of invention.
 

Another painted and stamped card...all and all we now have around 300 cards to sell.  Each one is also stamped on the back with this nifty stamp the school had made.....

All are the work of about thirty industrious 6th grade boys and girls!

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Rain Forest Animals

The 4th graders at St. Luke's Primary were studying about rain forests, so we created this large rain forest art piece with some rain forest animals. I had a big piece of brown paper I had saved...so we sketched some leaves, a tree trunk, and a big sloth on the paper and some of the girls came after school and painted it....

In the art class, I had all the 4th graders create colorful geckos and butterflies to add to our painting...

and then we glued all the geckos and butterflies to our large painting....

and we had a nice big rain forest piece to hang in the 4th grade classroom....

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