You may have seen some artwork pop up on the Lackawanna River Heritage Trail lately! This colorful project is run by Noral Kelly, a senior at Holy Cross high school, who is going for the highest honor in Girl Scouts, the Gold Award. For her project, Norah, as well as many other artists will be painting on different sections of the Heritage Trail in Scranton! Many of these artworks have popped up lately, but there will be more soon! I just recently finished mine last week! Below is the process of how I painted my section of the trail.

I sketched out my design before I started working on a piece of paper and then I drew that design again in chalk on the pavement. I knew that I wanted to do something cute and cheerful so I went with this happy flounder! I thought it would be funny to do something flat because of my painting surface being the ground, so of course I chose a fish that is notorious for being flat. I also added tape on the outside of my square so that I would have some nice edges on my artwork after I was finished.

I had some helpers with me, my wonderful mom and grammie, that helped me paint in the solid area of the background. They helped me complete this project a lot quicker. I had the primary colors to work with which I mixed to make my purples and oranges. The pavement was surprisingly a nice texture to work on with the paint. The yellow paint splotch on the left side of the photo is from me stepping in the paint before it had dried, don’t worry, we added some bubbles to cover this later on! I wanted to make it look like my flounder was laying on the bottom of the ocean, so I used a yellowish tan color and starfish to make that easier to see.

Here is my finished flounder! Just some things on my process; we forgot our smaller paintbrushes at home which made painting little details a bit difficult. We ended up taping a paintbrush so that only half the bristles would hold paint (sadly not pictured). I also used my fingers for smaller areas as well. This actually worked well! I worked in layers with my colors, using darker and flatter colors first and then adding more details and color later on. It was a lot of fun!

Here is a better picture from the top view! I also ended up signing my initials on the bottom right corner. I did this with my pinky finger of course!

I really love the overall idea for this project, and I know that it’ll make a lot of people happy to see these little pieces of artwork on the trail! When I was working on this artwork, so many people stopped to ask me about the project. So many also told me how much they enjoyed seeing all of the different pieces on the trail. I just think it is always a great idea to add a little color and creativity to anything whenever possible, and this project will definitely make this happen.

If you want to see more of the artwork already painted on the Heritage Trail check out #lackawannaheritagetrail on Instagram!