Week 2 Reflection

Week two was much different than week one, just ask the stiffness of my neck, back and arms:) Week one was a lot of planning and basic painting, which wasn’t tedious. This week, we dove into the really intricate designs that would nearly make your eyes water from staring so hard. Needless to say, the most progress is seen this week. Every day the bench has become fully and more colorful.  This week I learned that you have to be creative with what you’ve got. As previously stated in my blogs, the quotes we have on our bench are fairly small and require a skinny brush. We searched through our countless brushes and didn’t have one that could get the job done. The smallest one we had got fluffy at the end which was extremely frustrating. I had to sacrifice a precious makeup brush to the harsh black acrylic paint. I’ll definitely not be able to use the brush again, but it got the job done for our group! This week was definitely more fun and rewarding than last because we were able to earn some type of satisfaction watching it all come together. In the first week, we were really nervous about starting, but we were able to overcome that and work really efficiently. Since Shannon, Katelyn, and I are far from artists, this whole experience has basically been trial and error. With that being said, we’ve benefited extremely well this week from just learning different techniques whether it being regarding painting, sketching, or fixing your mistakes. For example, in the beginning of the week, when we messed up painting, we would take a napkin and white the paint away. Although this method wasn’t awful, it most definitely wasn’t the best. Say the color we wiped away was black, it would leave a gray area on the bench that we would then have to wait and paint over two or three times. As I’m sure you can imagine, that was extremely wasteful and time consuming. We’ve since learned that its best two dab away as much as you can (ASAP) with a wet napkin, and then go back with a wet napkin, apply a large amount of force, and very slowly wipe it away. This made it so the bench was as white as it was before! Luckily this weeks progress has contributed to accomplishing our goal greatly. Once we finish the bench, we can start volunteering at the thrift store. Even if it just ends up being for a few days or whatever, they need all the help they can get!