Children’s Mural at Church about the Beatitudes

I realized I never posted pictures of our finished mural at church.  I’ve been so busy with end-of-the-year stuff for school.

I worked on this mural all year with the 4th/5th grade Sunday School class.  It is 4 ft x 8ft.

These were the best kids to work with! They had great ideas, were mature and got along so well!

The process was a long one, with a few mistakes along the way.  We started by getting plywood for our mural and priming it with wall primer on both sides.  I didn’t realize that the type of wood would matter so much!  The entire board warped really badly.  Sadly we were unable to save that board and had to start over.

After consulting with other art teachers and muralists, I went to Home Depot and bought a hardboard panel instead (smoother surface so the primer won’t absorb and warp.)  I had them cut it into two pieces to fit in my car. I primed it again with primer.

My husband used a cement drill to make holes and hang the board to the wall.

The idea that our youth pastor gave us was to work from was the Bible passage of the Beatitudes.. “Blessed are the..”  The mural was inspired by The Beatitudes, Matthew 5: 1-10   The kids talked about the meanings of these and decided on the concept of “belonging” and “community”. They discussed when they most felt a sense of community and belonging and the idea of the campfire came up. Many of the kids had gone to Moon Beach camp with the church. The mural has that feeling of being inspired by God’s nature and songs (with the drums and dancing). Lots of ideas came up and we spend many weeks sketching, going through concepts and finally painting. The words around the mural go along with the words from the Beatitudes.  I had shown them pictures of the mural we did at my school, with the silhouette figures.  They liked the idea of using silhouettes for our mural.

After creating many sketches of our ideas, we took pictures of the kids in various poses.  Then I enlarged the photos, printed them out and we cut carefully around the edges. These were arranged and taped to the board.  Any other elements that we wanted to add were also sketched on paper, carefully cut out and taped to the mural (like the fire, the banner, the doves).

After cutting out the images, we arranged them on the board and taped them down.

The kids traced carefully around the shapes of the people with pencils.

We measured and traced a border around the mural with a pencil.  Then we placed painter’s tape around the lines so that the edges would be crisp.

Each of the basic shapes of the mountains, rivers and grass were also lightly sketched with pencil so everyone was on the same page.  The painting began!  We used a variety of acrylic paints.  If I do another mural like this, I would not skimp on the quality of paints.  Some of the colors of the inexpensive brands do not have the same quality of coverage.

We only met once a week on Sunday mornings for about an hour, so the mural took basically the whole school year.  We had some Sundays with no Sunday school or special events, so we usually ended up meeting about 3 times a month.  The entire class was about 12 kids, but it worked out nicely because kids came at different times (and rarely was there ever a full class), so we could work with them painting in small groups.

Here are some reflections from some of the kids.

“It was very fun to make a mural because I don’t paint anything on a regular canvas, or much at all. The most frustrating part was when I ran out of paint right when I was painting something important. I like mixing paints because it was like being a mad scientist mixing chemicals.” (Zane)

“Doing this mural was very enjoyable to do. I have valuable memories with the people in this room. Everything looks so beautiful and I helped make it! I think the mural will be a big hit! I can’t wait for everyone to see this!” (Tiesto)

“I think that we worked best together when we were painting the mural because we all had something to do and were all working hard and did it quickly. The most challenging thing was planning because we all had different ideas and we had to choose one.” (Mira)

“I really enjoy art so this was a total power point for me. I missed a couple of planning days so I had to catch up when I came back. We started out by planning. Then we painted the boards with some sort of paint which was really fun because the brushes were huge and they were only a couple of them so that meant only a couple of kids could paint at one time. I really don’t like planning. But I really like painting.” (Lily)

“Working on the mural was easy at times like when we were painting big areas but sometimes it was really hard like when we were deciding to make the mural. The Beatitudes helped us a lot during the process of deciding the design. The Beatitudes helped us decide the words on the border and what to do on the inside. The meaning of the inside is belonging. We also had a hard time deciding how to look at the mural—straight on view or above like you are flying.” (Josie)

“I think in some way that it was a unifying experience. When we were brainstorming it felt like our ideas fit like puzzle pieces. Sometimes our ideas worked and sometimes they didn’t but in the end it all came together. It was fun to paint and to think and paint.” (John)

“At first we started with an idea. Our idea was to paint a mural. So we had to come up with something to paint on the mural. We received a list of scriptures that we could use. The first scripture we looked at was the Beatitudes. We kept adding to our list of ideas. Then we came up with incorporating a fire. After wanting a fire in the mural we decided to have shadows coming together by a bonfire like we were coming more together as a class. When we started painting it was fun. Time was just flying by like a shooting star. Then we were done. It looked so good. We were all amazed. What used to be a white board is now a beautiful piece of art.” (Sylvie)

“Working on the mural was easy sometimes but we had a hard time finding a topic to paint and how to choose the colors. One of my favorite parts was when we started to paint and see all the progress on the mural and see how far we came. I love how we all got to know each other in so many different ways. We all had to work together on the whole thing and it tested our patience.” (Natalie)

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