Post, Miss Poste
So, here’s the other big thing going on. It’s taken two weeks, 6-7 hours a day, to get us here. First thing was to get the basic idea sketched out from what the principal and his assistant gave me. (I love the crayon, btw.) Then I got graph paper and drew it out more precisely. Then I broke out my level and meter stick and drew a guideline six feet high, because that’s about where the principal wanted the lowest point. Once I had that line I could transfer coordinates from the graph to the wall and tape a curve connecting them. All of that took me three days.
And when I came in Thursday, I got to redo everything because the blue tape didn't stick.
Frog Tape. It cannot be beat. It gives fantastic lines and it stays on the wall. Sorry 3M, but I just cannot use your Edge Lock tape any longer. Frog Tape 4 life, yo.
Click the arrow to scroll
Click the arrow to scroll
So yeah, Thursday was spent picking up all the blue tape and redoing everything, and also having a cuppa tea, some biscuits, and a nice sit-down because the YMCA basketball kids were in there for an hour. I needed it that day, too. But Friday -- Friday I got paint on the wall! Well, okay, primer. But it still felt like I was getting somewhere.
Ironically though I kind of didn't, because the yellow needed 3 coats anyway. Hey, at least I've learned for the other side. So the first picture below is Friday the 16th, and then we start to see some real progress in the next week.
The principal changed his mind several times on the details. If you go back to picture #1 you can see some of the rewrites. Initially he told me that he wanted between eight and fifteen inches of variation in the yellow (which I painted first because there is no way it's covering the blue). I actually went beyond those bounds, varying between six and eighteen inches to give it (I thought) a better look. I wasn't worried about him complaining because he gave me a lot of creative license. Turns out I didn't go far enough, because twice he asked me to widen the yellow in the widest parts. Which of course I did; it's his wall, he should get what he wants.
The downside is that my carefully planned blue wave did not come out the way I wanted. If you go back to the first gallery, you can see the sort of sine wave I tried to get in pic #2. I wanted it to start small and increase over time and that's how I roughly mapped it out. No I didn't use a calculator (though I did seriously consider it) and no I'm not certain that "sine" is the correct function. All of that is a couple decades in my past. The point is that I made that curve real pretty and then based the yellow off of it. And "the boss" wanted wider yellow, and ain't no way I'm getting a taller ladder and redoing the top of it, so I brought it down and taped off the blue much lower and I'm still not happy with that curve but I'm not going to try doing it over, I'm not obsessed.
I'm not obsessed.
I'm not obsessed.
Oh also before I did the blue I painted the base brown, which I did so that I could tape over that and get a real crisp line between the base and the wall. It worked amazingly well, and you can see it in the final image of gallery 2.
So yeah, I started the blue Friday the 23rd and finished it Monday the 26th. And then Tuesday the Fire & Safety Shop grabbed me to do some urgent stuff for them so I didn't even get to see the staff's reaction. (And I'm certainly not saying that Tatyana should give Bill a hard time about it when she reads this. I would never suggest that she, oh I don't know, put toner in his coffee, or plead with Baba Yaga to give him boils or something.)
Tatyana works in the front office and the whole place would fall apart without her. She and her husband are from Ukraine and I tell her about the fun Slavic stories I hear on the Myths and Legends podcast, and she teaches me a few words in Russian and pesters me to write a book. I work with some awesome people. Happy Thursday, all.