Painting Process

DAY 1:

I used this time to sweep and leaf blow the blacktop to get the dirt and leaves off of the surface to prep for painting.

I then started with the basic white lines that needed to be redone. I used a line striper to cleanly redo all of the faded lines on the basketball court, copy cat, and the "track".

Afterwards, I started painting the alternating green and blue four square squares and quickly realized that I did not have enough paint. My mom and I painted as much as we could before we ran out of paint and then called it a day. 

It was a pretty short day but gave me a good sense of what I needed to do differently on the next painting day. 

DAY 1.5:

I did not paint the next day due to rain but what I did end up doing was going out to buy more paint for the four square courts. 

DAY 2:

This was the big painting day! I was there from 8am-7pm.

We set up a station under a tent with a tarp for us to put all of the paint cans and trays to prevent any paint from getting on unwanted areas of the blacktop. From there, we began! I had a ton of help from my team members. I had Mrs. Keune going on the rest of the blue four square boxes, my mom on the green ones, my brother painting the orange base for the maze, and me taping out the hopscotch walk. 

As the day progressed, more people came to help paint while other people switched stations after they needed to let something dry. We made sure to have the four squares and hopscotch base done first so that we could give them time to dry before we started to paint more over them. In that time, we worked on the compass by chalking it out, taping it, and then deciding what colors would go in which sections. Once we got that down, we began painting - and because of the sun, the paint was drying super quickly.

For all of the sections that had been taped, we made sure to stick it down well and dab it with either a sponge or a brush to prevent the paint from bleeding underneath the tape.

I had already printed out a maze blueprint to use while painting and my dad and Mr. Gervin came up with a great way to map out the giant maze which I was struggling to figure out. They gridded out the map, we chalked it out, then used the paint striper to paint straight lines. It turned out looking awesome. We used an orange base coat, white lines, and a light orange outline. 

Once the other base coats dried, Claire set to work on free handing large killer whales (the schools mascot) in the game leader square of the four squares while Delaney and I started to chalk out the hopscotch walk.

The day wouldn't be complete without something going wrong. I picked up a small can of yellow paint to paint the circles on Copycat, the paint can slipped from my hands, fell on the ground (on top of my phone) and popped open leaving paint going EVERYWHERE in a spot it was most certainly not supposed to be. Instead of totally freaking out, I cleaned up my phone and scooped as much paint as I could back into the can. The dropped can of paint left a huge yellow splat on the blacktop. We problem solved by turning it into a sun and surrounded it with clouds and butterflies. It looked like it was supposed to be there in the first place! We also added a moon and stars painting opposite of the sun to make it look even more intentional. It honestly makes everything look so much better!

We ended the day once the sun started to set and light was running low. We were so close to being done!

DAY 3:

Day 3 was our final painting day and it was exciting. It was a Professional Development day at the school so only a few people could actually it out to come help. So my friends Olivia and Delaney came and helped me finish this project. 

We started by tackling the rest of the hopscotch walk. It took a little bit because we had to paint on every letter of the alphabet for the ABC's jump. Once that was finished, Olivia had to leave which left Delaney and I to finish off the rest of the project. 

We added our finishing touches and finally took pictures of the final product! We were there for 5 hours and closed out the day by adding our hand prints onto the corner of the blacktop to make our mark at the school that we went to as kids.