Celebrating the project

What a good turn out for the event yesterday, it was so nice to see so many people come back and celebrate the work of the community. We had a few others as well and lots of people connected to the project in other ways... a very full cafe!

After a few short presentations and a couple of well deserved thank yous (Lucy, Keith, Sally G amongst others) we spoke to some of the volunteers and found out about their experiences of the project.

It was really sad saying bye to everyone at the end, it has been a lovely project to be involved in and I will miss working with this group. I'm looking forward to coming back to put up some of the participants work for Somerset Art Weeks in September. Check back and I'll post more information closer to then.

Thanks again to everyone who was involved in this project in whatever capacity that may have been.

Here is the final art work, so you get a sneak peak...

Installing the art work

Spent the afternoon on Friday installing the art work. Nice to finally get it up on the walls and see what it looks like in the space.

After a change in tactics in installation, Keith and I had to come up with elaborate ways to keep the work up while it dried to the walls. Trays, wood offcuts, trolleys and weights seem to hold the key.

Keith was going back the next day to remove all the supports... so fingers crossed it has all stayed in place... I haven't heard other wise.

Celebration event on Wednesday, do come along and see the finished art work.

Finishing off the painting

Lucy and I spent the day finishing off the painting today. We started by finishing the leaves / grass... doing the bits we had missed and going over the bits that didn't work. That took much longer than we had expected. We had a good day though accompanied by some good music, plenty of tea, sunshine and surprise cakes.

Then it was time for a bit of planning, seen as the rest of the work is quite graphic with clean lines we had to continue in this fashion. We were planning to add flowers as we had discussed with the groups, some people even began to sketch ideas in the previous sessions. We used these and spent quite a bit of time getting the design right... Not as easy as it sounds, we must have drawn 30 attempts and eventually settled on one idea but to use it at different sizes over the pieces. We mixed 3 simple bright colours to lift the work and add colour.

Next was making stencils, it was a bit scary to start with, but so we got it right we worked onto paper first and cut these out laying them onto the large panels to get the sizes, colours and positions right. This worked really well and meant we didn't make any mistakes and got it right first time!

The almost finished panels...

After stepping back and evaluating we were pleased with the work, we felt it encompassed many of the groups ideas and will work in the space. We still had to add some creatures as requested by the group and Lucy worked hard to create a very simple stencil that would work on some of the panels...I like the ladybird and think younger visitors to the cafe will enjoy spotting them (4 to find)