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Today was my final day with the WITNESS Project youth, and we switched gears from stenciling walls to talking about our next poster project. Over the past few months, our group of young artists have been working on a series of public service announcements to address the problem of street harassment. They have written and filmed the PSA’s and are now getting ready to edit them. We wanted to coordinate the launching of these announcements with another poster campaign that would address the same issue. So today we worked on that project.

We spent the morning talking about how marketing can effect society both for good and for bad. We saw some examples of ad campaigns that subtly reinforced the notion that street harassment was somehow acceptable behavior. Looking at these ads got the group thinking about how powerful advertising really is and how they can use the same techniques to get their message across.

We divided into groups and answered questions about who we should direct our message to, what we want them to think, how we want them to feel, and how we want them to behave. We also talked about positive vs negative messaging.

The groups came up with some great ideas for the poster campaign and then presented or pitched their idea to the rest of the group. All the ideas were very good, so I know as they continue to refine their ideas in the next few months, I am confident that they will put together an effective campaign. It should be a great project and I am eager to see what they come up with.

We ended our time with ice-cream and good-bye hugs. It’s been a great week and I look forward to working together on our next project.

Today we were all smiles as we gathered at the seawall to finish stenciling at that location. We started earlier in the morning which really helped us from getting wilty. The crew stenciled vigorously and with a renewed precision which made the stencils look great.

As we reached the end of our painted white section, we found that we had some space left. A couple of our guys suggested that I paint the word WITNESS on that section, and then we could all initial it. It was great to have everyone leave his or her artist mark on the masterpiece they created together.

It was good that they were energized by the successful early part of the morning because we had more work to do. The next wall to stencil was the wall of School of the Nations.

We were given permission to paint one set of eyes so, we chose the location and went to work. The sun rose higher in in the sky, but our group now had this process down to a fine science. Fortunately, this wall was smoother and flatter that the seawall, we were able to complete it just in time for lunch.

Again we were tired, but our chicken and rice gave us the strength to go on to our final location, Help and Shelter. As we were painting at School of the Nations, a couple of our creative thinkers headed out to buy a can of spray paint to see if that may work better for the stencils. They tried it out, and determined that we should try it here at Help and Shelter. The spray paint worked well, but we found that one can does not quite cover an entire stencil, so our final work of art became a mixed media piece.

I think our stencil project was a success, and tomorrow will be my last day with the group. They now have the materials and the technique to continue covering Georgetown in stencils, reminding their community that what we see changes who we are.

After a good night’s rest, our crew was ready to stencil. We headed back out to the sea wall and unrolled the 12 foot stencils. It’s a good thing we all like each other, because it was going to take a lot of cooperation to make this happen. We needed half our group to hold the stencil in place while the other half painted.

We worked closely, side by side, to paint the first set of eyes on to the wall, and it was well worth the effort. When we peeled the stencil off the wall, it was pretty cool to see. All the hard work we did the day before paid off. The stencil looked great. We took a moment to look at it and admire it.

Now, it was up to us to continue paint stencils, alternating a stencil of eyes with a stencil of our tagline “What we see changes who we are” – JR  on the sea wall until we reached the end of our white wall. Enthusiastically we went on. However, the sun shone extremely bright today and the heat was cooking us as we painted.

As our painters painted, some of our crew handed out fliers to folks diving by letting them know what WITNESS Project was about. Most people seemed happy to slow their cars and grab our little brochures.

A few hours went by, and as lunch time approached, we took a break to evaluate our work and noticed that as the sun beat down on us, our energy level and attention to detail began to wane a bit. We noticed that the most recent stencils have taken on a more abstract look, and that if we had continued without breaking, would eventually end up looking like a bizarre Rorschach ink blot test. Yay for lunch!

We hypothesized that now that we have eaten, perhaps the energy that the sun dried up, had once again returned. We decided that since I was the resident painter, I should repair the last eye stencil the best I could and the rest of the team would continue down the wall. Sadly, the sun had done it’s work. As the team finished the next set of eyes, they called to me saying, “You’ll probably have to fix this one too.”

Because projects such as these can have unexpected challenges, we planned for some flexibility. So, we decided that we will finish the stencils tomorrow. We will start earlier and we will succeed!