Elizabeth Sadecki

Colors that last. The art department paints floor murals for the Novi Home and Garden Show. Art students painted different animals for eight hours and got their first taste of a professional job in the arts.

The art department painted a zoo of animals on the floors of the Novi Home and Garden Show, giving students a taste of what a professional job in the arts is like. 

“It was fun because it was the first time we kind of got to work in a group and work out how to draw something big like that in an actual professional environment,” junior Connor Tran said.

The Novi Home and Garden Show is a spring convention that allows professionals to display their work to potential customers. In early January they contacted art teacher Jennifer Ramirez about working the event. 

“I was kind of skeptical and like, ‘oh what do they want,’ but I answered and said, ‘I’m kind of intrigued by what you’re saying, but let’s talk’,” Ramirez said. 

The head of the event and Ramirez bounced ideas off one another about the murals before they got to work. On Wednesday, April 3, the students assisted from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. painting different animals. About 10 students were brought along to help paint.

“This was the first kind of art feature of mine, and it was really cool because it was professional work,” junior Braeden Sanborn said. 

Despite this being a smaller project in comparison to earlier projects, Ramirez participated in the event from past years. The job still stood apart with its own difficulties.

“They (the workers) were driving golf carts around there and we had caution tape on our painted animals and the workers there, moved the caution tape and drove over some of our animals,” senior Avery Lemley said. “So that made us kind of mad, but other than that it was really fun.” 

Ramirez returned Wednesday night and worked for an additional five hours. She then returned the following day along with colleague Nancy Druia to finish up the murals where they ended up working until one in the morning. 

“The whole thing was like walking around to see what other people were doing and having them see what you were doing was really fun,” Tran said.

After the months of planning and days of work Ramirez was happy with the result. During that weekend customers saw the spider, possum, squirrel, fox and several other animals created by the Eisenhower arts department. 

“The whole thing,” Tran said, “walking around to see what other people were doing and having them see what you were doing was really fun.”

“It was different in the sense that we had to do a lot of experimentation to figure out how to paint on the floor without leaving a mark on the floor,” Ramirez said. “We ended up putting a very thin sheet of plastic down that stuck to the floor, and then we painted on top of that.”