Description:
9X11 dark pink poster board with streaks of blue, black and white paint tempera paint making an R out of the clear space. There is fire soot damage on the left hand side that could have been cut off, but wasn't. The back side is blank except for the pencil line of part of a flamingo. You would have to know it was a flamingo. Just the base of the neck and part of the body are outlined.
Story:
Let's talk the paper first. I was, for five years, a student manager of the St Thomas Public High School volleyball team. I was one of four who had the job each year. During the season I kept the official score book and assigned the points to the player who last touched the ball for a score. I would also help set up before the games but two of the managers were always two guys and they did the heavy lifting. I could go on at length about the poor quality of our net the first year or two and what it took to set it up, but that goes beyond what this is all about. Anyway the job I did for five years started well before the season. The basketball cheerleaders would make large posters for each player and the coaches and the cheerleaders and the student managers and put them on the wall. The cheer squad had five people, so even while it was a larger group of posters there was a lot of help. I had me. Sometimes Peggy, another student manager would help, but it was pretty much up to me. I’d come up with a design and get approval from the coach, and then have to make the posters -which in the day of dot matrix printers meant finding an image, tracing it on a transparency, then borrowing the overhead projector in the library, finding a place (back room in the library) where you could tape up a poster board, and project and trace the image and then paint it and cut it. Lots of times there was a lot of painting, but one year I decided to do tropical birds. The coach was a macaw. The student managers were toucans and the players were flamingos and thus I didn’t have to paint much if I used pink paper. It was by far my most popular design.
Second in popularity was the year I just made letter T (our team was the St Thomas Tommies) using marble art. I cut squares. To get the font right I borrowed a school letter for the T. Coach and managers were on white paper. The players were on yellow with purple and white streaks.
I had learned to do this kind of marble art in the first grade when we did a Valentines art project. That was in LaPorte, IN and my teacher was Mrs. Kemp. We made hearts on white paper with red paint. The process was to figure out the curve of a sheet and make sure it curved down. Then we had a heart that was taped down onto the paper. The paper was set in a box and a marble was dropped in red paint and then set in the corner of the box. From there it was a matter of rolling the box around so the marble streaked across the page. Do that until the page was covered with streaks. Carefully take the paper out of the box. Let it dry a bit and then remove the taped down heart leaving an image made with (what I learned in college was properly called) negative space. It was fun, made an impression and I really wanted to do it again. It was in high school that I finally found an opportunity and explained it to Mrs. Kappel, She was OK with it, so I got poster board and paints from school and set up shop in the basement letting posters dry on the ping pong table. I'm guessing the R was a sample I made with scraps right after the flamingo project (which would explain the colors of paint) and might be the example I used to sell it to the coach.
Mrs. Kappel was impressed enough by the concept that a few weeks after the posters were up in the gym, I got a phone call from her daughter's Girl Scouts leader in Grafton, who wanted any advice and tips I had for doing such a project because she wanted to try it out with her troop.
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