Turning Hate into Love

Hey guys!

Yesterday as I was closing the doors at Blogilates HQ,  getting ready to go home, I noticed something weird on our building:

Grafitti!!! UGHHH!!!! How could someone do this!? What does it even say? What does it even mean? “WR?” And if you were gonna tag my building, why didn’t you at least paint something cool!?

Because I didn’t have the original bucket of paint that was used to color this building, this wasn’t going to be a simple paint-over job. If I wanted to coat over this small area…I would need to coat over all two stories of the building! So I got to thinking…how can I use this as an opportunity to create something cool?

Then it hit me. Let’s turn hate…into love.

Why don’t I paint a big ole heart over it?

I went to Blick Arts that night to buy a big paint brush and then I started mapping things out. I would need to essentially paint a mural! I remember learning a little bit about murals a kid. You have to grid out the area you want to paint on paper beforehand in order to translate that onto the wall. So that’s exactly what I did here! I’m lucky the building already had a natural grid for me!

I then used pencil to draw the big heart on the actual wall. Once that was done, I grabbed a half full paint can of Blogilates Pink and got ready for my first gig as an official mural artist!

I grabbed some old clothes, put my hair up in a bun, threw on sunglasses and started tracing the outer edges of the heart first. I was really careful not to get any paint on the ground, my shoes, or myself! Some random people walked by and asked me if this was for breast cancer awareness, but I just told them that I was turning hate into love :)

This was what it looked like after 1 coat of paint! Not bad huh? The Blogifam came down to check on me every once in a while to see how I was doing! Good thing they did though because I had some odd interactions with some pretty odd people on the street. One tried to take pictures of me for “street art inspo” (yeah right), one tried to scam me into buying something, and another one yelled at me for not taking his business card even though both my hands were full! I just painted on and ignored the weirdness, which is usually what I do when I don’t know how to deal with negative situations. Don’t worry though, I’m fine!

Ready for the final result?

After about 1.5 hours, I finished my masterpiece of love! I was surprised to see how symmetrical it turned out! The pink adds a nice pop of life to the blue! OMG I love it so much!

You know, sometimes things happen to you in life that suck. But you gotta learn how to turn those negative moments into opportunities to be better. If no one had tagged all over my building, I would never have drawn this heart. So to the person who did this, thank you. You pushed me to get creative. Now, when I walk in and out of the office, I will no longer walk idly past a blue wall. When I start and end my work day, I get to walk past this beautiful pink heart and remember the story of how I turned hate into love.

from Blogilates http://ift.tt/2pzTkKR