Librarian on Display: YA

Post-it note art is something I have wanted to try for the past year. Ever since I first came across pictures of offices and libraries with post-it note art on their walls I thought it would make a wonderful project for our library. This year we decided to incorporate Post-it note art into National Library Week. There are several images available online that are basically ready to go. These images are mostly of old school video games like Mario Brothers and PacMan. Although they are really cool looking, I wanted images that related to the library. I was unable to find these ready made, so I created them myself.

I decided to make Harry Potter, Gandalf (Lord of the Rings) and Ironman (we have Ironman comic books). I didn't want to give the students the full design, it seemed too easy and they would be finished too quickly. Instead I separated the image into 10 images. This way ten students or ten teams of students could participate. Each team would just put up the colors that their image shows and the design will slowly be built as more and more colors get put up. We decided to give out prizes to the student who guessed what characters they were creating before the design was complete.

I made a grid on a large sheet of butcher paper. The grid is 3' high by 5.5' wide. I then drew in 3" x 3" squares (the Post-its we are using are the 3" x 3" kind). However, you could use the images below and go with a 2" x 2" post-it, just adjust your grid accordingly. I purchased all the post-its at Office Depot. I did have to manipulate the colors from the original colors of the images. You will see in the images provided that they show the post-it color not the original color so the students wouldn't get confused. (Light grey became light blue, royal blue became blue, Brown became orange, peach became pink) I was unable to find black post-it notes so I ended up just cutting out 3" x 3" squares from black construction paper (black seemed too important to the design to replace with an alternative color).

Here are the 10 images:

The Post-it Note art project was such a big hit that I put a second grid up. I didn't have time to create brand new images as I did above but if you search online you can find some old school video games like PacMan and Mario. I then brought the images into Photoshop and tweaked them to fit my grid and to make sure that there were no post-it's that needed to be cut like in the first images.I then just hung the photos up above the grid and handed the students stacks of post-its.