Pop Art Park Bench Project

This was one of the projects that I had the most fun with in art with my grade 5 to 8 students. I was asked to paint some park benches near the playground. The community bought paint. I had freedom to design what I wanted. So I chose the Orange Crush can as a bright orange bench to paint. From a distance you can see the orange slice on the back of the bench. We are a nutrition positive school so I was worried about using pop as a theme but no one seemed to care. People from the community liked them and said so as we were painting them. The students did the backgrounds and I did the fine details to perfect the letters and droplets and shadows. I did Sprite and 7Up on either side of the Crush bench mainly because that was the pop sold in our machine at school. Also they were blue and green.
The next fall I painted a Coke and Pepsi bench because they were near the ball diamonds and the pepsi can had a girl on it with a baseball cap. Coke and Pepsi are rivals and these benches faces opposite ball diamonds. The Pepsi bench was much more creative than the Coke bench. Kids loved them. The idea was to avoid graffitti. But they still spray painted red on the white Coke letters and blue on the white Pepsi letters.
This past year the community asked me to paint the park bench on the top of the hill. I plan to do Mountain Dew on it. The other school had painted red and white stripes on it and green and yellow stripes.
I've written an article on murals and how to paint them at Bright Hub. The article is called Pop Art Park Bench. It talks about the materials, method and mural websites to check out. This has been one of the lasting art projects I have done at this school and one of the most rewarding.