Recently another San Francisco based volunteer, Brigid Brahe, came to Hatua with a project concept for our students to paint murals of the local Likoni community during their Spring Break holiday. The project's main goals were to teach students basic drawing and painting skills while allowing them to express their creativity, to learn teamwork, and to ultimately use the murals to raise awareness and funds for Hatua. Brigid felt that we could digitize the art work and place it on items such as t-shirts, beach bags, posters etc. to sell to the local tourist community as well as on line in the US and Europe. We decided there would be four 5' x 8' murals painted on canvas and each mural would follow a theme based on a local Swahili proverb.
We hired two local art teachers, a Finnish art teacher named Suvi and a very talented local painter named Peter. During last week's sessions Suvi and Peter taught the students basic drawing concepts, basic painting technique and color theory, then sent them out to photograph images in the community as inspiration for their murals.
This week the students continued to practice their painting skills and have gotten into their groups to work out their mural imagery and composition in readiness for next week's mural painting event.
