Paint the Halls: Senior Evyn Roberts is painting murals for the English hallway windows for her International Baccalaureate Creativity Activity and Service Project

On her first day of winter break, senior Evyn Roberts sat on her couch, sketching and painting little yellow stars for her International Baccalaureate Creativity Activity and Service project with the movie House of Gucci echoing in the background. This everyday winter break routine was just the start of a multi-month project — creating literature-related murals for 10 different English classrooms.

Evyn has been fascinated with art her whole life. Growing up in an artistic family, she has been influenced creatively by her grandma. Whether that meant them using leaves or flowers from nature to turn into art pieces or her grandma sharing her next innovative project idea to entertain her. When Evyn was younger, she’d go to her grandma’s house and practice art for days on end.

“My grandma was the type of person who just had art scattered all over her walls and throughout her house,” Evyn said. “So my love for art definitely started with her as well as being creativity inclined all throughout my life, always thinking and creating in an artistic way.”

It wasn’t until high school that Evyn found her own art style and the proper outlet for her art to be recognized. When Evyn isn’t painting murals for her CAS project, she’s cutting out magazines and collecting stickers for her collage business where she makes and sells phone cases and prints. The rest of her free time is filled with sketching and doodling little people and patterns as well.

When English teacher Kristin Anderson voiced that she desperately wanted something instead of the dusty file boxes filling the English hallway’s windows above the lockers, Evyn had just the idea to fix the situation: murals.

“I was sitting back at my desk, listening and I said to the class, ‘Or someone could make something to cover up the [cluttered mess],’” Anderson said while pointing to the windows. “And Evyn immediately called dibs and I thought, ‘Yes, that would be glorious.’”

At first Evyn wasn’t sure about her plan of action for her artwork in the English hallways. Painting was the art form Evyn does the least due to the large amount of time that goes into it for her to enjoy the final product. She juggled with the idea of painting the windows directly but found it would be inconvenient as she could only work on the 32-inch tall by 19-feet wide windows while at school. Considering the project would be such a big undertaking, finding a way to do the project at home seemed like the most logical and best idea, according to Evyn.

Evyn decided to create insertable poster board murals for the windows. Evyn asked each teacher what book they would want represented in their classroom’s mural as the books taught in each class are different depending on grade and level. Since first starting the murals during Thanksgiving break, Evyn has been spending time sketching and painting the boards with her acrylic paint alongside the help of some of her IB classmates. 

“I’ve known Evyn for all four years of high school, but we didn’t really talk until junior year when we joined IB and naturally became close,” Senior Caroline Gorman said. “She is a very creative person and when I heard her CAS project idea I thought it was brilliant and I knew I wanted to be her second-in-command painter.” 

This time-consuming process has been easier for Evyn with the help and support of her peers. She’s relieved that she can use art as a positive outlet on the daily, now making the English hallways brighter and more colorful all because of the passion she picked up as a little girl.

“I think everyone’s CAS projects are super interesting, getting to see what everyones passionate about,” Gorman said. “The murals ended up just perfectly aligning with Evyn and her creative personality.”