Post-It Mural

It's done, it's hung, and it's AMAZING!

In the words of one of my third graders "I think we outdid ourselves this year."

Come see it LIVE and IN PERSON at the 9th Annual Art & Music Show TOMORROW 5-9!

Post It Mural

It's DONE! We actually got it done a bit faster than I thought we would. I don't have a photo of the whole thing finished yet, as it will be hung just before the art show, which is now officially scheduled for April 19th!

Not quite finished, it took two more classes after this photo was taken. The bottom strip is not photo'd, as it was already finished and in storage. 

 I couldn't get more red Post-Its, so I ended up making the sun a little bit smaller. It is going to be amazing, I can't wait to get it hung! 

FINISHED!

Post-It Mural-Day 1

 I planned on starting our Post It mural with my fourth and third graders today. I got an email from the fourth grade teacher that they would be 15 minutes late because of a presentation. They ended up being over a half hour late, and got ten minutes to work on this. They were really bummed, but I assured them that they would get more time another day. The third graders worked on it for the whole class period. We started by watching the video of the business creating their mural that I posted last time and moved on to how to read my Excel chart. I then showed them how to mark each square with what color Post-It should be attached there. I'm not sure I should have started this way. It may have been easier to just start with the Post-Its, but I plan on having them add double sided tape to the bottom of each Post-It and that stuff really sticks. I don't want to risk the paper ripping if they make a mistake with that stuff! 

 I got smarter after watching the fourth graders. Originally, I had printed four copies of the chart, one for each long roll of paper. That proved to be a little confusing for the students working on the middle two rolls. Before third grade came in, I cut each of those charts to show only the squares that the students would be working on in their specific strip of paper. This worked much better, and the kids got a lot of work done. 

Post-It Mural



I thought about saving this post until our Post-It mural is complete, but that won't be until April and I figured perhaps someone out there may also be inspired by this idea, so here's where we are right now:

I have been completely inspired by a blog post that I came across while searching for images for a presentation on Andy Warhol. Despite finding the video on YouTube, I cannot get it to load into Blogger, so you can find the post, with a time lapse video of the Post-It note mural they created here. I am so inspired, that I have decided to create my own Post-It notes mural with my students! Their image was Pop Art, and it works really well for this techniques, so I decided to stick with Pop Art.   Pop Art is one of my favorite styles, so it's amazing it's taken me this long to decide to have an art show with a Pop Art theme.

To begin, my student teacher and I chose an image. We decided we wanted to go with something from Roy Lichtenstein, as I thought his comic book style would not only interest the students, but also work well with the pixelation we needed to create. While searching, we came across his painting, "Sunrise," and we agreed that that's the one. Mrs. Leland (my student teacher) pulled the image into PhotoShop and used a filter to make it appear in squares. Each square represented one Post-It note. Because we are doing this with elementary students, we decided to transfer that image into Excel to make the squares more obvious to the kids.

Transferring the image into Excel. Each square is one Post-It note.



Finished the transfer! It took me about 3 1/2 hours and is eight pages to print!



It's going to be AMAZING!

Close up of the Excel spreadsheet.

Our plan is to tape roll paper together to make a canvas large enough to accomidate our image. Together, we'll draw out the squares on the large paper. We have an atrium, which is where it will be hung for the art show. It is also where we will work on it. The plan thus far is to have grades 3-5 work on it once during their art classes. I have all of those classes before lunch, so the paper can be rolled up when the last class of the day is done with their contribution.