Project Description
In the early summer of 2014, our church took on the task of doing an Extreme School Makeover for Harvard Park Elementary (Springfield,IL). I took up the task of taking lead on beautifying the hallways and stairwells and also with helping create better wayfinding for the students. It took a bit of work but the process went amazingly well as I just worked ahead of the crews of painters, drawing up some easy to paint, color coded wayfinding elements and city scapes. Between shifts I would clean up our painting stations, fix any areas that needed fixed, and prepare for the next wave of painting volunteers. One all the base painting work was done, I went back over everything adding in the outlines, lettering and details. All in all, the process and the job was a wild success and everyone did a fantastic job.
Below are a few photos from the week:
Springfield Sharefest had the honor of working with Troy Freeman and the team at FreeSky Studios for our “Extreme School Makeovers.” His contribution allowed our project to elevate to the next level. What Troy adds to a team and to a design is really priceless. Can’t thank him enough!
A gathering of volunteers between shifts. From this group, I would pull as many “skilled painters” as I needed and put them to task helping base paint the hallway murals.
One of my many volunteers having fun with her task at hand.
Part of one of my “crews” base painting the blue in one of the stairwells.
Another crew base painting. Here you can kind of see the wayfinding pieces that I already had drawn onto the wall.
“Uptown” is the top floor of the school; reserved for the “big kids” so I designed this cool graffiti inspired graphic for them on this wall. This crew did a great job base painting it for them!
The finished “Uptown” graphic that I came back and did the outline and detail work on…
Me adding in the outline and details. The volunteers did such a good job getting everything to this point, it really made my job a ton easier.
Final hallway with the outlining and wayfinding painted. Here you can see how we color coded each floor and represented that on the wayfinding signs.
Finished stairwell heading to the top floor (Uptown).
Finished “Midtown” stairwell
Finished “Downtown” wayfinding. I had a lot of fun painting these!
The break between “Downtown” and “Midtown”
Harvard Park Elementary also never had a mascot so the administration had the student vote on what they wanted their new mascot to be and the Harvard Park Husky was chosen. Based on that, I went ahead and designed them up this mascot, they loved it, and so I went ahead and vectorized it, added in their school colors and supplied them with a folder full of support files to use from then on. School Pride!!!! Go Huskies!!!!
I couldn’t just stop with designing the logo so I went ahead and designed a cool stripe pattern and painted the new logo in the gym for them…
