Aubrey Gerber pauses as she works on one of several street lamps on the mural she’s doing at the Syracuse Community Center. The mural looks like a game board featuring community landmarks. Photo by Lauren Zeugner.

By Lauren Zeugner
InkFreeNews

SYRACUSE —  If you’ve stopped by the Syracuse Community Center the last few weeks, you may have noticed the wall with the lighthouse donor board has changed.

Where it once was white, it’s now painted black with drawings of local landmarks done in white.

Aubrey Gerber, a 2025 Wawasee graduate, has been working on the mural for a while. Gerber spent most of her junior year doing stylized drawings, over 50 of local landmarks.

“Some other kids did some here and there,” she said.

The plan was always to do a community mural, but there were delays.

Gerber decided to take project on and get it done this summer. She spent two years on the drawings and has spent two weeks on the mural. The donor board proved to be an inspiration for the mural. Gerber said that was the first hurdle since it is so dominant on the wall.

“I’ve always been in the art room,” she said about school.

She took an art class her freshmen year at Wawasee, then Christi Ziebarth joined the staff.

“She’s been present with a lot of ideas and let me get my hand involved,” she said about her mentor.

The mural at the community center is the second one Gerber has done. The first featured peonies and is at The Beauty Bar.

“I really like large-scale art,” she said. “I’ve always been drawn to architecture.”

With that in mind, she intends to major in interior design at Purdue University.

“It makes sense for my interest,” she said.

She said she’s always been drawn to architecture. When doing plein air she finds herself drawn to straight lines rather than something organic.

While working on the community center mural, she scans the drawings into Canva, an online, graphic design tool, prints out the drawings on printer paper and then traces the drawing onto white carbon paper, which is between the drawing and the wall. Then she goes over the carbon paper drawing with a white paint marker or fine paint brush.

“I like the precision the marker gives,” she said. “This is a bit more tedious (than her first mural) to get the size of the drawing I want. The process caters to the wall.”

For her first mural, she used a projector for the peonies.

It was her idea to do a chalk board with white drawings on it.

“It’s a lot of up and down the ladder. It’s a workout,” she said. She knows when she’s done when she starts to contradict her decisions.

While working on the mural, Ziebarth stopped by to see how she’s doing.

“I let her loose on this one. She was ready for it,” Ziebarth said. Looking at the progress, she added, “Looks like she has her groove going. I learned a lot about this community through this project.”

Some of the decisions Gerber made was to include farm animals at the eye level of children.