The Philbrick Hall teens, Teen Leadership Assistants, and After School Leader K-Fai Steele collaborated on an ambitious series of post-it murals this past month. They discovered the post-it mural art form by connecting to the teen tumblr blogs at the Naperville Public Library,  Arlington Public Library , and  La Porte County Public Library . Some more intensive research brought the teens to the source of the medium: competing French office workers . The Philbrick Hall teens and TLAs were inspired to create post-it murals of their own.

The teens began the process by discussing favorite old arcade and early Nintendo characters that were created in the age of pixel animation. Some ideas were Mario, Mega Man, Donkey Kong, and Pac-Man. They used graph paper and highlighters to map out the characters, and created schematics using 1-inch squares of construction paper and painter’s tape. They employed some simple math skills to determine how large of a space we would need for the 3 x 3 traditional post-it size (they had to scale down many of their original, more ambitious ideas; all teens agreed that Ben Franklin in post-it form ended up looking like a “terrifying clown”). The most difficult part of the process: finding black post-its.

See the Pac-Man and Pikachu post-it murals in Philbrick Hall at the Parkway Central Library from now until the end of July. The Philbrick teen tumblr blog can be visited at http://freelibraryteencenter.tumblr.com/

-written by K-Fai Steele