papershine

On Friday Papershine hosted it’s first Poster Party and Art Show at the West End Bakery in West Asheville. The event was to celebrate the creation of Papershine- our educational design studio- and the release of Learning Murals, our first product line. The event was well-attended by the under-7 set and their parents. We had four poster-coloring stations set up around the bakery and hundreds and hundreds of crayons and colored pencils. It was great fun and very noisy. The bakery provided tiny PB&J sandwiches, cookies and brownies.

Our friend Todd brought his one year old son Lucas, seen here exchanging crayons with Abe before they tackled Abe’s Alphabet together.

It was fantastic to see how many parents got involved and colored with their kids. The greatest thing about the size of the Learning Murals is how it allows collaboration. A whole family can work together on a poster. It’s such a natural and fun way to interact and play together.
Kristin and I would like to thank the many people who made this all come together: Cathy, Krista, Louis, Reid and everyone else at the bakery for letting us take it over for an evening; all of our contributing artists- Lucy, Chelsea, Amy, Athena, Bergen, Sirus, Jerome, Sara, Jason, the Red Stick Ramblers, Grace, Matt, Henry, Linda and Gary; Will and compnay at Henco Reprographics for printing the posters and being so supportive; Merrimon Galleries for an excellent job mounting the art work, Sara for staffing the wine table and the Asheville Mamas for showing up in force.

Thanks for the color.

On Sunday evening we hung the show with a lot of help from Reid. It looks great and fills the walls well. We may add one more poster after the show, but that’s too much to think about right now, with trying to get everything together in time for Friday.

This is the poster that we hope to complete the night of the opening. The current plan is to cut up a few of them and put the pieces in a basket, inviting kids and their families to color and sign them. After the show we’ll gather them up and glue them over the blank poster.

This is a small sample from the Friends with Hobbies Learning Mural. Kristin and I completed this one as a ’sampler’ to show several different media on a single poster. This fellow is done with collage- mostly from toy catalogs, magazine ads and origami paper- and magic marker. The butterfly is a digital print of a gulf fritillary we photographed at the butterfly exhibit at the WNC Nature Center a couple of weeks ago.

This poster just arrived in the mail from Lucy, Chelsea and Amy Gartland, a family of artist-friends from Rhode Island. It’s at the framers right now, getting matted for the show. It even includes a couple of pages from Mo Willems’ book, “Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus.”
By the way, we are not affiliated with Mo Willems in any way. We’re just fans.