the hudsonian blog: October 2020

Senior year... hard to believe this is the last year in High School.

How do you make this year special when there are so many restrictions and unable to have the usual privileges? You go ahead and do a Senior Parking Spot even though you are still in remote learning.

What to pick? That seemed to be a tough decision. We trolled Pinterest and she really didn't see anything that sparked her creativity. As you might remember from previous post last year, this girl loves her Broadway musicals... Let us take it from there. I asked her to give me her Top 12...

I got on my digital scrapbooking program and came up with a design from each shows logo.

Ok, we have the idea, now how do we make it a reality?

I took each logo and made it into a PDF. I used this tutorial on YouTube to make a template of each.

Print large scale photos

I knew the measurements of her parking spot ~8ft across and 16ft in length~

I determined I would be able to get 3 designs across making each box 2ft with the necessary distance between and on the edges.

Next the fun job of cutting out all of the templates ...

Wow, that was a job to get all cut out. She then played with the order she wanted them in so it would look "aesthetically pleasing" to the eye (in other words, colors looked complementary beside each other). As you can see from the photo above, this was what she decided on.

Now off to pick out the colors at the paint store. Primer, latex water base paint, sealer, rollers, paint trays, brushes, etc. We also had a lesson in getting an estimate on how much $ this was going to cost us.

We did what we could on getting colors, then knew we would be mixing for some colors.

Now the big paint day ! We had the design and paint, now she needed friend to come and help.

My best friend from my High School days and Jessica's best friend also came to help.

Husband came to help blow off the parking spot from debris and get the primer down. We taped off our outer edge for the requirements we were given from the school.

Primer is down! It actually dried faster then anticipated due to the wind blowing. Now to mark off all of the background squares for each logo and the playbill section ... That was a job that I ended up reworking twice to make sure I had the square straight in width and length.

I was very disappointed in the fact that the painters tape did pull off parts of the primer. I thought it was due to old tape, but it did it also on the new tape that we had purchased as well.

The goal was to get all of the block base colors painted and the yellow playbill background painted on the 1st day. We worked from 8 am until 2 pm because in my infinite wisdom scheduled senior pictures for that day as well ...

We weren't too far off of the goal at the end of the day. We actually got the majority of blocks painted and logo lettering done on 4 blocks. (dang ol' tape that pulled up primer)

Thanks Deana for the wonderful painting aprons you brought !

Day 2

Man was I sore from sitting and bending over tracing and painting yesterday ... The show must go on and we must finish. The best friend came to help today and what a great person to have ! She is quite the artist and did a lot of the detail work on some of the logos.