In Small Gardens: Capstone of the Week: Tie! New Mural Using Native Materials

This week we will be featuring two Capstone Projects from the Fall of 2015. The first is a succulent garden. Succulents are great to include in a garden because they require little maintenance, need limited resources and are beautiful! This garden already looks like it has been incorporated into the landscape.

The second is a mural which is a mandala. Wikipedia defines a mandala (Sanskrit: मण्डल, lit, circle) as a spiritual and ritual symbol in Indian religions, representing the universe. In common use, mandala has become a generic term for any diagram, chart or geometric pattern that represents the cosmos metaphysically or symbolically; a microcosm of the universe. The students who chose this project wanted to feature the various elective offering at our school and to show that everything, at school and in the world, is connected.

This semester we have also been working on a new mural. It is much small than the mural featured in this post and the "You Are My Sunshine" mural from last year.

It is also another collaboration between Environmental Sciences and Visual Arts. The mural feature the animal which was our first endeavor into Animal Husbandry, the chicken. The idea came to some students while exploring the campus and noticed an abundance of Mountain Laurel Seeds. They also noticed many of our chickens had coloration in the red spectrum. Our first step was to find an image online of the profile of a chicken.

We then edited the photo in Photoshop to reduce the image to the main colors of Mountain Laurel Seeds.

The preparation of the seeds took the longest. The seeds had to be removed from their shells and then sorted by hue.

We printed the image off on a transparency. We projected the image onto black foam board and traced the shapes. From there we filled the shaped with glue and glued the correct colors into the space.