In September, we connected as a group to wrap up our year together and finish our legacy project! It was exciting and satisfying to continue our collaboration see our work come together.

Earlier in the year we started creating prize ribbons that represent parts of ourselves we don't normally share or honour, and we had discussed some options for how this artwork could be displayed in the library. In September we returned to our ribbon creations. We delved more deeply into themes of personal identity, and explored the contrast between a vibrant prize ribbon and less traditionally celebrated part of our self.

We started gearing up for the legacy project and it's launch party! We made lots of posters to promote the project, and we worked together to write a collaborative artist statement for our work:

"We made these ribbons using paper, fabric, glue, cardboard, ribbon, and other materials. We worked slowly and with care, and with help from each other. We choose the words on our ribbons by thinking about how we felt on that day, finding a word that represents us well, using our minds, asking a partner for input, and sharing something we don't normally share. To us this project means: an expression of creativity, showing our passion for art, and getting to know good friends."

Of course there were some drawing games and mini projects thrown into the mix as well!

For the legacy project, we chose to display our ribbons in two different ways: as a large poster where all the ribbons are visible in one place, and as smaller die-cuts prints scattered in the library's living room space like a scavenger hunt.

As part of Culture Days, we invited the public to come check out our artwork and make a ribbon of their own! This felt like a great way to introduce the community to our project and celebrate the end of our collaboration. It has been a wonderful year, and I'm really grateful to have had the opportunity to get to know and work with such an insightful and creative group of teens. I'm also excited that our legacy work will be on display for library patrons to experience.

This July at Express Yourself, we had the opportunity to work intensively together for a week of creation and collaboration. This was different than the more spread out structure of our earlier workshops, and was a chance to build on ideas and skills from day to day, and connect as a group.

We continued our exploration of expressing identity through art, starting off the week by making an incredible collection of prize ribbons. Each ribbons represents something unique and meaningful about it's creator. I love how many of the ribbons honour components of out identity that we might not usually share or celebrate, like "messy" and "shy." Collected together, they make an interesting portrait of our group:

We continued this theme through personal collage creation:

We explored the connection between identity and place, building a collaborative web/map of places, and then making hand-drawn postcards of places that have shaped and impacted who we are:

Objects were another way into our exploration. Each participant brought in an object that represents an important aspect of their identity. We used photos of the objects to make oil pastel prints, and compiled them into a collaborative collection:

Continuing our learning about visual storytelling, we made comics inspired by stories about ourselves, and skills and interests we want to share:

We also started discussing our legacy project, which will be displayed in the library this fall. We brainstormed possibilities for how to format and present our artwork, and then held a voting process to narrow down our choices. We will continue the legacy creation process when we re-unite in September!

On the final day of our July workshop series, we reflected on our week together and each participant shared a word to describe their experience:

(If you're wondering what "Slay Monkey" means, it was an ongoing joke in reference to this amazing and terrifying collaborative drawing):

For me, this week was inspiring and rewarding. We found more and more opportunities to work together as a group, have meaningful conversations about creativity, identity, and our differences/similarities, and I saw growing confidence in many participants. I am excited for the upcoming final leg of this project!

June was a wonderful month for Express Yourself! We wrapped up our spring workshop series, working together on collaborative projects while continuing to grow our own voices and confidence as artists. As usual, we also took lots of time sketch, doodle, chat, and play art games.

We continued to explore visual storytelling, comics, drawing and collage to create zines. Each zine expressed something unique about our identities and perspectives, ranging from favourite buses and types of airplanes to imaginative stories about our pets to to TV show recommendations to lists of prompts for how to destroy zines!

We then made photocopies of every zine, so each participant could read and take home a complete collection, representing the work of every artist in the group. We also made DIY zine library boxes to keep our collections in.

I loved seeing how these finished zine collections express the diversity of this awesome group, and that each person was able to experience, appreciate, and take home a little piece of their fellow participant's creativity. We rounded out the month with another fun Saturday drop-in workshop, creating amazingly detailed stickers!

Of course some participants took things to the next level, inventing the concept of 3-D stickers:

In May we had two more Express Yourself workshops in our regular series at Richmond Public Library, as well as an extra pop-up drop-in workshop. Our regular group is hitting our stride, getting more comfortable together, and delving into expressing our personal identities, differences, and similarities through art.

Earlier in the spring, we had a conversation as a group about individual interests and curiosities we would like to explore in our project, as well as materials and mediums participants would like to try. Inspired by this, our May workshops used air dry clay to bring in some more tactile possibilities for participants who like to work with their hands and express themselves in three dimensions.

We discussed how different internal aspects of ourselves could be expressed externally through clay. As usual, I was blown away by the insight and creativity of participant's ideas, like representing different emotional states through intact or smooshed creatures, and creating objects the represent meaningful stories that have shaped us. After our creations dried, we used paint and drawing to add colour and detail. This project felt special to me, because both the choice of material and content were informed by participant's interests and individuality. And of course some humour found it's way in too:

For our drop-in workshop, we returned to zine making with a more in-depth spin. Using the prompt "Things I....," we made zines to explore our unique perspectives. I appreciated how even more seemingly mundane topics, like "Things I Saw on the Way Here," or "Things I Want to Remember" had the potential to express a lot of information about each artist and their view of the world.

Of course, we also did lots of sketching, doodling, and games, like the classic "exquisite corpse" AKA "make a monster," working together to create this wall of collaborative monsters to watch over our workshops:

April kicked off our workshop series at Richmond Public Library, including youth participants from Aspire as well as the larger community. We are beginning to establish a rhythm, with check-in questions, sketchbook time, group games, art making, and reflection each day.

Our first workshop focused on using drawing, lettering and collage to make stickers, which could be used to personalize our sketchbooks. We also held a sticker swap at the end of the workshop, so participants could appreciate each other's work and take home an artwork by another artist in the room.

As we worked on our creations, cutting, gluing, sketching, and laughing, we chatted about our personal style and voice as artists. We noticed what aesthetic of collage materials we were pulled towards, and the tone we wanted to create with out stickers (silly, ethereal, dark, cute etc). A guiding intention for this project as a whole is to explore how our personal identities and backgrounds can inform our artwork and creative expression. This felt like a fun and gentle way in to that question.

Our second workshop in April was all about creating personal symbols through stamp making. We discussed the use of symbols in art, and brainstormed how aspects of our identity (interests, personality, world view etc) could be translated into a stamp. This was a helpful jumping off point to learn more about each other.

We then added out stamps to a collaborative banner. I'm hoping we can keep adding more contributions to the banner in future workshops, so it slowly becomes a representation of this diverse and wonderful group.

We ended each workshop with reflection as a group, and invited participants to jot down a word that described their experience:

Welcome to the project blog for Express Yourself! A community engaged artist project working with Richmond Youth. We kicked things off with two wonderful workshops at Seedlings Child Care Centre.

We worked on a collaborative doodle station, played drawing games, made zines to express our interests, and masks to explore aspects of our identities! It was a great chance to start to get to know each other and begin to work together in a creative and collaborative space.