Charity Mural Painting during Deepavali

Two weekends ago I spent my Deepavali painting a mural for this refugee learning centre of Afghan and Kazakhstan kids, well kids from central Asia.

It all started with Amanda texting me one day asking if I was interested to do some charity work that involved painting, being me I said yes without even asking where or what or who. "Why not?"

So two weekends before that we visited the centre and saw the walls and then the following week we went to scout for materials. Impressed that Amanda managed to secure sponsor to pay for the materials within the first week she decided to do this. Then she invited her friends + sisters and I got a new friend of mine who's into volunteering and we met on Deepavali morning for roti canai at 9am before starting a hard day's work.



We didn't know what we were doing. I supposed we were quite privileged in life to never have the need to paint our own walls. Water-based and oil based paint were all new stuff to us. Thanks to a sponsor campaign I had with Nippon years ago that I learnt a little bit about painting a wall: simple things like double coating and water-based paints are always easier.


The girls on the fun wall.


While the boys work on the less creative art - calendar. lol.

When everyone was sketching out something with a pencil on the wall, I sneaked a rest after lacquering the wall with white base paint; though such luxury was short-lived after Amanda caught me snooping lazily behind so she passed me a pencil and asked me to draw something too.

So I drew a fairy.

Kids need some magic.



Then I realised it was really difficult to apply house paint on delicate drawings. -.-
And even more troublesome to mix paint to achieve the exact color you want. We only have the basic colors to play with.


So I cheated with Sharpie. lol





Then I asked for Gary the snail (from Spongebob Squarepants) to be painted on the wall. So Amanda drew the snail and Van painted it; with a few modifications. Cause they didn't want the snail to look too much like Gary.

boo...




Close enough.







Took us three whole days to finish everything, longer than we had expected. But in the end we managed to finish it by Tuesday (public holiday, bless Malaysia), skipping Monday which was a work day.

Here are some of the images of the mural that day.


Magic shrooms? hehehe. I mean... Enoki mushroom.






Nice or not? I drew the birds.


Blue birds. Hehehehe....

And the gang...






Good job everyone! *self pat on shoulder*