I’ve been working on a couple of projects over the last few months that we’ve been keeping under wraps so they would remain a surprise. Well, now the event has come and gone so I’m able to share! When I heard that the theme this year for my children’s school auction was “Our Schoolhouse Rocks”, I knew we could figure out something very “rock star” to do with the kids. With a lot of help, we were able to get through all of the nearly-300 children, all rock stars in their own right.
Each class had their own unique pose, like Kindergarten (shot from above to highlight their small stature), 1st grade (I just had to use the gorgeous leaves that happened to be there!)
A couple of different ideas using the gorgeous brick. These boys were perfect for me…..I think we’ve got Metallica and James Dean here!
This sweet boy had the perfect punk look once we styled him….but HE brought the perfect attitude…..awesome! And this adorable 5th grader needed no props at all, I loved her hair blowing from under that cute hat!
I shot 6th grade through a cut-out shape in the brick, I think it turned out so cool. I loved how the kids really went for the whole idea! And 7th grade had no problem jumping up on the ledge above me to give us a different perspective.
And all of 8th grade jumped for joy at being so close to graduation! This was one of my favorites!
Step two. I collaborated with an amazing art director/copy writer Jay Meyer, who has no connection to the school, just a generous heart. A fellow school parent, Chryste Sullivan, knew Jay and pulled the strings to make it happen. She was incredible in helping through the process in so many ways. Jay created these fantastic magazine covers for us to sell as a fundraiser at the auction. He made a different cover for each of the 9 classes, each with fantastically clever headlines. An incredible amount of hours invested in personalizing the covers with the children’s names and making the necessary adjustments to the copy so that it worked with each of my images.
Here’s an example with my own sweet guy:
As of the night of the auction, we’d raised around $3400 (Update: total is now over $4500!!!) with these images, and I understand that many more have been sold since then!
I wanted to donate something else to the auction and thought it was the perfect chance to make a mosaic. I included each of the almost 300 images of the kids multiple times, adding up to almost 1500 individual tiles. I had the image made into a 34×22 gallery wrapped canvas….it was so delicious, I almost wanted to keep it for myself! But I was thrilled when a generous family scooped it up for 1K!
Reaching for a star:
And a close-up of the mosaic:
by Jen
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