A Neighbourhood Small Grant, a silk screen workshop with Blim and a second vaccine.

It has been an exciting week, it started with a bang! Well kinda, I got an email at 12:02 am Tuesday morning. How was I reading my email at that time you might ask? I work a serving gig a few nights a week and we get home late sometimes. I wind down in a lot of different ways, first stop my email to catch up with anyone who might have reached out.

Thank you for applying to the Neighbourhood Small Grants (NSG) program. 
Every year, a committee of neighbours reviews all of the NSG applications to ensure that projects meet our program goals. The Committee greatly enjoyed the creativity in your application, and loved your project idea! On behalf of the Neighbourhood Granting Committee, I am pleased to inform you that your project was awarded funding!

I can’t wait to share the project with you, right now I am in the process of pulling together the location and the date. As soon as I have a poster to share you will find it here.

And then, the week got even better.

Then I learned how to silk screen with the fabulous people at Blim, so fun. I was able to take a course, buy the supplies and bring my own shirts to screen on and pay for studio time. The set up is perfect and any question I had was answered with ease.

The screen I choose to make is from my latest grouping of drawings, moving away from using my photos and carrying the continuous line into what feels good as I move my pen across the page. I am using the exercise of drawing a self portrait with your eyes closed and inspiration from other illustrators to make these new drawings. I am filling pages in a sketchbook with practice day after day and it is a practice I am really enjoying seeing develop. One I could see going BIG as a community based Mural to. Let’s see what we can do.

The week rounded out with my second shot, my first was AstraZeneca and my second one is Moderna.

How was your week?

A mural at Makeshift co-working space.

I reached out to Makeshift when I wrote my pivot grant back in January asking if they would be interested in a mural. They were! So I made my way over there to meet Monique, with a caveat, did I want a show for the month of March. Of course, I did. So when I went to meet her for the very first time I brought my ready to hang the show with me and a friend to help.

When I went back in April to take my show down I suggested the mural again, we stood in front of the main wall in the middle of the space and talked about what it could look like.

Not one for waiting or a lot of patience I saved up some tip money from my hostessing job (3 shifts a week) and headed to Home Depot with my idea. If you build it they will come.

I pitched the idea of a community mural celebrating Pride, LGTBQ, and that everyone is welcome in the space. Monique loved the idea, cleared it with her business partner and I got to work. This space is an easy one to be in, so bright, comfortable and welcoming. Co-working is something that is important to me because the feeling of community and belonging is important to me. You have both with Makeshift.

Still no word on the grant but as soon as I do hear you guys will be the first to know.

Here are some images from that amazing mural I created at Makeshift. Go see it for yourself, I would love to know what you think.

The final image in this series is one I created as a practice. I drew the faces on a piece of painter’s canvass primed with some house paint to see how I was going to paint the faces and to see how long the process would take. I am speaking at a symposium next month and I will use this practice as my custom-made Zoom backdrop.