Make it with me: We All Grow Here

Introduction

Like most artists (I think?), I am perpetually displeased with what I make, or rather, I’m not satisfied with it for long because I grow and outgrow what I make all the time (which is normal, but sometimes too much).

Although it’s something I’ve learned let go of (somewhat) while making art for public spaces, because these projects live a long time after they’re “finished” and can’t be hidden away. I remind myself that they were made at a certain time, for a certain place, and they have a life outside of me (and that’s a good thing!)

Once in a blue moon, I happen to make something I’m really happy with for an extended period of time and it becomes the thing I chase/try to one-up/build on. We All Grow Here is definitely one of those projects. It grew a soft spot in my heart way before the artwork even came to be. Now that it’s over and I’ve had time to sit with it, I’m ready to share more about it.

That’s a wordy intro to say you should read this behind-the-scenes tour of We All Grow Here —part of the City of Brampton’s My Neighbourhood Art Project: a series of site-specific, temporary art installations created in collaboration with the local community.

Project site

The McMurchy Community Garden and the Kiwanis Sports Centre for Youth Excellence (next to each other) had chain link fences that needed a little sprucing up. A little later on, the Creditview Community Garden was also added to the project for a total of 3 sites.

From the initial site visits, I took in the feel of the place and made note of the garden plants, the fencing, and some of the existing painted wood artwork/signage. The Creditview Community Garden also backs into a Fire Station!

The people

I was paired with Gigi Losier | @gigilosier—artist and animator extraordinaire who was going to assist on the project. Luckily, Gigi has tons of gardening experience and knowledge of plants and what you could make with them. This winter, I must find butternut squash soup/ravioli à la Gigi, haha.

Erin Glover (Acting Manager, Public Art Officer, Cultural Services) managed the project with the gentlest hand and connected us with city staff at the gardens (Carina, Emma), Saphera (artist! coordinator re: celebrations) and the Minoh team (Dwayne, Marco, Jo, Peter, Charlie, Frank and Austin),

Over 70 community members were engaged in the process including the Boys and Girls Club and the Cobra Swim Team at Kiwanis, and the gardeners at both McMurchy and Creditview Community Gardens (੭˃ᴗ˂)੭

Community workshops

I modeled these workshops after the community workshops I had just done with Alchemy Artist Residency, Summer 2024 —which originally came about after days of discussions over dinner (thanks Claire & Michele). At Alchemy we collected wild grape leaves from the Millennium Trail for the Wellington Community Market. Visitors were engaged in a quick-and-easy but satisfying art activity that tied in the land. See their great grape leaf rubbings here:

For We All Grow Here, gardeners were invited to use a bloom or leaf from their harvest (it was the end of the season) to make monoprints with block printing ink. We also collected leaves and plants from the surrounding neighbourhood to print. The Boys and Girls Club particularly liked the ginkgo leaves, which printed beautifully. Note: I went with ink because I planned to scan and digitize the artwork and figured more contrast/crisp lines would help.

This is super easy to do at home. All you need is a few materials:

Block printing ink. We used Speedball but and even acrylic paints work if you work quickly enough
Sponge applicator. Dab, dab, dab a thin coat all over, work quickly so the leaf is still shiny looking before you print
Your choice of paper. Gently press/rub your inked leaf, be careful to not let it slip and slide around

Official workshop documentation from the city below ☀️We had gorgeous sunlight and were surrounded by fresh garden smells, it was a lovely time! Participants were also encouraged to share stories growth —a great harvest, a new experience, or lessons learned. Among other things, we talked about:

Surprise encounters, mishaps and stories
The meals gardeners go on to make from their harvest, many of which held cultural and familial significance to them
Local/neighbourhood plants and wildlife 🐇
Time spent with friends at the center
Things they would like to see included in the artwork

Sketches & project proposal

Then, it was time for research, collecting reference photos and turning our conversations into sketches. I also reference the participants themselves for most of the characters. There were many pages worth of rough sketches, which were narrowed down and grouped according to the different project sites.

The plan was to collage illustrations with community-made prints and install artwork on the fencing as a series of double-sided panels.

Which panels should go at each site? How much space was there for artwork?

Figuring out compositions on the various fences

After cleaning up my sketches for all the chosen panels I made rough mock-ups for each site and put together a proposal with my plans for everything (project goals, process, references, artwork treatment, colour palette, more community engagement plans, moodboard with inspirations). Note: Refined sketches were done in Procreate, and I put my proposals together in Illustrator.

Scanned images of aaaaaaaall the community-made monoprints! These were left with us, many participants also took their artworks home instead

Artwork production time

Once the project proposal was approved, I coordinated with Gigi to get artwork production underway. This was a bit tricky to plan out because although I have experience on painting projects and collaboratively designed/painted murals with community members, I had always done digitally illustrated projects on my own (as far as I remember and up to this point).

Messy processes and disorganized naming systems are totally fine when I’m on my own (no one has to see anything but the print-ready files lol). However, working with someone else on 40-50 separate illustrations, not to mention all the leaf prints. I want to us to use as many as possible, but it takes trial and error to find a good match for every illustration and coordination to avoid duplicates. In the end, I made an excel spreadsheet with a progress tracker for every panel at each site, with google drive links to my sketches, leaves to collage with, references/colour palette, and finished artwork panels. I tried to make everything as clear as possible and ensure the workload was appropriate and manageable :)

I sent Gigi this pink image to explain my process and we divided up the panels to work on individually.

The artworks were coloured digitally, but the linework was done with brush and india ink before being digitized, to preserve the hand-drawn quality and better match the organic leaf prints. The images above (right) are scanned ink drawings that hadn’t been vectorized yet.

This is what the linework looked like after being vectorized and isolated. I wanted to preserve the slightly wiggly quality but remove any erroneous marks, and flatten the ink into one solid colour. This way we could also fiddle with the lines a bit or adjust compositions.

Anyway, I was overly worried about the process! Everything went smoothly and Gigi knocked it out of the park! I love that Gigi’s artworks got the bedazzle treatment with stars and sparkles that are reminiscent of her usual style. The goal was to strike a good balance between artwork made by community, me and Gigi, and I think we got there :) You can see a panel from me on the left, and Gigi on the right:

Printing/installation

Next up was coordinating with Minoh to print/install the artwork! This happened during and after artwork production. We had a shop visit (thanks for the tour!) and many emails and files sent back and forth to sort out proper materials for longevity (sun and weather damage, tamper proof), sizing and cut lines, screw head colours and so on for all the panels.

I didn’t screenshot the print files Jo (Minoh) and I sent back and forth with the die cut lines at the time and I don’t feel like opening massive files atm, so you’ll have to imagine that. It’s just a series of artboards to fit Minoh’s print/cutting machines, with artwork packed in tightly, and with red cut marks around every panel. Ps. The panels are white, which is the same as the leaf print backgrounds, so we don’t have oddly cut out shapes floating around. -ˋˏ✄┈┈┈┈

Look how beautiful! Seeing everything in real life after so much envisioning and fiddling digitally was awesome.

⋆𐙚❅*°⋆❆.ೃ࿔*:

On a very cold, winter day in February, Gigi, Erin and I met with the Minoh install team at McMurchy and Creditview to install the panels. Peter, Charlie, Frank and Austin were troopers 💪🏼💪🏼 There was so much snow, it was freezing, and we had to sort through so many (heavy) panels to find the correct ones for each site. They then had to undo a bunch of screws for each double-sided panel (there’s wooden spacers in between), coordinate with us to figure out placement, and screw it back together.

Since the screws are tamper-proof (you need a certain something to undo them), and coloured to match the panel artworks, they’re not easily replaceable. There were a couple dire moments where we had to go fishing in piles of snow for a dropped screw hahaha. It’s not visible in these pics but Creditview snow piles were nearly up to our knees!

Gigi, Erin and I were running around trying to figure out where every panel went according to the plans, but also adjusted the composition as we went because proportions had changed. Spacing didn’t look quite right in person or there was some puzzle piece fittings to do around obstructions.

A BIG thank you to the Minoh crew! 👏👏👏 (also shout out to the firefighter who let us in because the park entrance was locked that day and there was no way into the place. For a moment there I thought we’d have to climb the fence and lob the panels over, I swear this is a city-approved project haha)

Even though the panels were designed to live with the gardens in bloom, it was a nice pop of colour in winter time.

animation/interactive activities

While we waited for the gardens to bloom again to celebrate project completion, I worked on the other community engagement components:

An animation with all the community-made prints we had, accessible via QR code on the didactic panel (to be installed later on). Originally I wanted to the project to be Artivive activated but some technical issues came up and switched to a QR code for an easier, hopefully more “permanent” solution.
Colouring pages for a takeaway/activity on project celebration days

I chose one of the panels to be the starting point for the animation and sketched out all the frames for a short, animated loop. The oval overhead is a marker for where the leaf prints would go.

Then came the same process of inking the lines traditionally before scanning, vectorizing (Illustrator) and colouring (Procreate; same colour palette, same brushes as what I used for the panel illustrations). I also ended up vectorizing the leaf prints and changed up the colours for the animation. I layered everything together and animated it in Premiere Pro.

As for the colouring pages, I put together a small selection of lines and leaves from the project artwork for print outs, along with project information. For a downloadable PDF if you want to colour them yourself click HERE. Please send me pics if you do some colouring! 😊

Celebration

We revisited the gardens to celebrate We All Grow Here late Summer/Fall, right around the end of growing season, bringing us full circle to when the project began the previous year. Gardeners were harvesting plenty, talking about the year’s events and meal plans for their goodies (the tomatoes had a good year! Last year there were many complaints of them being sad and lumpy). Everything was luscious and green and it smelled amazing.

The didactic panels have now been installed and the city made them a lovely soft pink! How fun 🌷ε(´｡•᎑•`)っ 💕

My favourite part of seeing the artwork after many months is that some of the panels have been partially consumed by plant growth. I loooove this and hope the panels continue to become one with the gardens (ෆ˙ᵕ˙ෆ)♡♡♡♡♡♡♡

Erin (left) & Gigi (right) - I put little Erin and Gigi characters in the artwork too ;)

closing thoughts

Putting it out there in the world that I would love love love more projects like this! Making art in collaboration with community, getting to plan and pitch and put into action more involved public art projects, opportunities to experiment with what I make/how I make it. Projects with gardens? Drawing plants and animals? Food adjacent? Yes please ❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥

Every project has its ups and downs, and there’s always room for improvement, but only some give you that top tier feeling of satisfaction and warm fuzzies. I am thankful for everyone and everything that aligned to make We All Grow Here so special 💖

On a personal note, this has been a rollercoaster of a year for me with high highs and very low lows. The world feels like it’s on fire (literally and figuratively). It feels like I’ve been at a crossroads for too long on many fronts, from minor to major life things and sometimes it’s all too much. I don’t like sharing my personal affairs too much online, but I think it’s —not necessarily important, but not unimportant— to say if you’re having a hard time, you’re not alone. Although I’ve been writing this post while anxious and unable to sleep this past week, it has been a pleasant exercise in reflection/appreciation and I am trying to focus on that. If you’re reading this I’m sending you good thoughts and strength.

The artwork is temporary but it’ll hopefully be there for several years! Please visit if you have the chance and take a look at all the artwork the gardeners, the kids of the Boys and Girls Club/Cobra Swim Team, Gigi and I made together.

✧˚ ༘ ⋆｡˚ Well! You’ve made it to the end. Thanks for coming along on this journey back through We All Grow Here! If you have thoughts/questions I would very much like to hear it ദ്ദി ˉ꒳ˉ )✧ Project page on my end TBC but the city’s documentation is here

（♡ˊ͈ ꒳ ˋ͈）/
Linh