Hi friends, happy belated new year! 🎉
To begin 2024 I’m wrapping up a project I’ve been working on over the course of 2023; Snail Mail! („• ᴗ •„)
It’s a long one so get ready for artist Q&As, thoughts from a first-time micro-grant writer, and a review of my explorations in AR (augmented reality) including a stop motion animation plus the Artivive and Mental Canvas apps!
If you’re wondering what is Snail Mail all about Here’s a quick summary:
Snail Mail is a community-engaged public art project that facilitated a pen pal exchange between creatives and community. I invited 3 artists to join me in this project, and together we created art packages that were mail out to interested community members.
Recipients were then encouraged to respond to the project via a postcard provided in the package, and which we then share(d) in our community gallery here
Artist Q&As
This project wouldn’t have been possible without the contributions of Anjalee, Ray and Amanda who collaborated with me. A few considerations I had when deciding who to invite on this pilot project:
Has connections to Mississauga although the project isn’t limited to Mississauga only
Our collective practices/styles are diverse (music, illustration, public art, writing, photography) to make for a well-rounded and interesting viewing experience for community members receiving our artworks
This wasn’t a requirement but it worked out well that everyone had an interest in working with community in the past
And of course, all these people have wonderfully rich creative practices that I admire, and were willing to participate in a big experiment with me!
Get to know the team a little more through this Q&A! 😗
Q. What do you enjoy most about your creative practice?
AMANDA: For me, there's a lot to enjoy in a creative practice! Being curious about the world and playing with new materials are two things I always return to. I also love being in a supportive community of practice, where I can share and create with other artists!
RAY: Experimenting and trying new things out. Pushing my creative mediums and ideas in new ways. Constantly growing as an artist. By meeting and working with other creatives and communities I would have not known before collaborating.
ANJALEE: What I most enjoy about the practice of writing is how it can take me into unexpected places. No matter how much I plan the overall journey, I can always count on encountering surprising and beautiful vistas as I embark upon any journey of writing.
LINH: I’m all for experimentation and play! It’s the best when every project is different and present new creative challenges.
Q. Who/what influences your work?
AMANDA: Currently, I draw inspiration from personal narratives, my family history, and art history. Some artists who have deeply supported my thinking through these topics are Zinnia Naqvi, Julius Manapul, and Ursula Handleigh. I also love collaborating with other artists in the community! Being able to create alongside my peers, like Linh, Anjalee and Ray, brings new ideas, motivation, and belonging.
RAY: Other creatives and communities I work with. Learning about different art forms and cultures from different creatives around the world with each new project I do.
ANJALEE: A plethora of people, writers typically, but really anyone, and the books that I read influence my work. I’m a promiscuous reader, so I don’t constrain myself to a genre or any particular viewpoint. By reading as diversely as I can, I ensure that my brain is as malleable as it can be, which in turn allows me to be as creative as possible.
LINH: I draw inspiration from stories/storytelling, food and culture, and of course nature! Some of my favourite artists include Ed Pien, Wenting Li, Sha’an D’Anthes and Winnie Truong.
Q. What currently motivates you to create?
AMANDA: This is a tricky one because sometimes I feel like I need to create way more and way more often than I do! I have to remind myself that being a creative/an artist can look like lots of different things! Even when your practice is moving slowly (like mine) that counts too! I'm most excited to create when I can be playful with materials or try something new! I'm also motivated to create when I'm around other artists!
RAY: My community and fellow artists friends and collectives I am part of. Seeing my friends push their art work to other levels is what inspires me to go harder and push my art practice.
ANJALEE: What currently motivates me to create is the awareness that I am still learning and that I have a long way to go in the pursuit of excellence in my craft. So, the more that I create, the more opportunities I provide for myself to try new things and work on old things.
LINH: My capacity to create is currently low, but I stay motivated by following through on previous commitments I’ve made to myself and others.
Q. What are you looking forward to from the community pen pal responses?
AMANDA: Seeing the diversity in the responses is my favourite part! There are so many beautiful moments in the images and words we received back! I love that folks have taken the time to share a bit of themselves with the team! Thank you!! <3
RAY: Hearing the impact the artwork has on people in the community and how it brings positivity into their day to day life. I like hearing their stories, what inspires them and seeing their artwork and creative input to the project.
ANJALEE: What I look forward to and enjoy the most from the pen pal responses is seeing iteration in practice. We create artwork through our postcards, and a pen pal’s own creative juices are stirred up and they’re moved enough to create their own postcard-based artwork. And theoretically, we, the original artists, could respond back, and they could respond back, and we could continue, and eventually this iterative process of responding can yield art that moves beyond the postcard format. The possibilities are endless!
LINH: Surprises! I wasn’t sure what we would receive in response but receiving a handwritten note in the mail is just a lovely feeling. I had hoped that by facilitating these connections, some lasting impressions would be made and it’s definitely done that for me. I’m grateful for the engagement Snail Mail has received.
Q. I hope to have future editions of Snail Mail, what would you like to see happen?
AMANDA: YES! Snail Mail 2.0, please! :) It was a wonderful project to be part of! I wonder if it could grow to include more artists and reach all across Mississauga! If it's an edition, saving the artwork from artists and the community, like you've started to do on your website, would create a lovely archive which could live on or be turned into a publication! This was so much fun. Thank you for including me and for all your patience with me! I can't wait to see Snail Mail return soon! ;)
RAY: I would like to see more local initiatives like this happen and inspire other creatives to do their own engaging public art project's. Having more creative inputs from different disciplines around the globe and across Canada. Engaging more creatives and awakening a creative revolution from within. Where artists support each other and work together to make their communities and environments a better place.
ANJALEE: I think that Snail Mail is perfect as is that I cannot think of any way to make it better!
LINH: I agree with Amanda about the ongoing archive and publication, and Snail Mail 2.0! I’d love to include more artists, reconnect with year 1 pen pals, feature youth artists or maybe collaborate with an animal rescue center to have the animals be postcard models? Plenty to think about!
A huge thank you to the inaugural Snail Mail team. You’ve been a joy to work with and I look forward to seeing what you all get up to this year!
microgrant writing???
Thinking back, the part I found most difficult about writing this grant was streamlining my ideas for this project into something concise and impactful. There were so many ideas I wanted to try out! However given the timeline, considering other ongoing projects and my own capacity for creating and so on, I had to be sure I was pitching something achievable.
It was tricky to plan something I’ve never done before so thoroughly, or maybe I just needed to plan it out thoroughly to be able to write it out simply. The word count restrictions were fairly small (25-300 words per question) so we had to get to the point quick. It was a lot of time spent pouring over a small amount of text.
As visual learner, pictures are always helpful so the diagrams I made for the proposal were for the jurors but also for myself! I couldn’t write anything until my ideas drawn out. These were referred to constantly while writing, and throughout the duration of the project to keep myself on track. Here are my two favourite pages from the supporting documents. (Side note, all my proposal documents/invoices/etc look like this. Why have boring documents when they can be fun?! I make templates for myself and refresh them occasionally to match my current artwork)
I don’t know why this diagram took so long to figure out, but when I thought “oh it’s a spiral!!” the whole project plan finally made sense in my head. My brain had a lightbulb moment and I’m still quite satisfied with myself for coming up with this 😅
A couple things changed as the project progressed but I stuck to this game plan as much as possible. I was handling all the image files (multiple artworks per person, logos, different icons and formats of various things). This pile grew and grew over the project so having a visual plan helped me keep the most important bits organized, especially since it had to be handled by the printer(s) and not just myself.
One thing that was a little scary to do for the grant was outreach. If you know me, I’m a very nervous speaker and not exactly a people person. Reaching out to artists, organizations and city councilors to ask for participation/support for a project I may not even get was nerve-wrecking (even friends or people I’ve worked with before). It was important that community be involved in Snail Mail though so it only made sense to tell people about the project and ask for help in sharing Snail Mail with a larger community than I could reach. Surprise surprise, it turns out there wasn’t much to fear! Everyone that I spoke to was very kind even if they weren’t interested/able to support the project. I also know that many of our participants found Snail Mail through this outreach so it was well worth the effort 😊👍🏼
This project was funded by Mississauga Arts Council’s Matchmaker MicroGrant Program through the support of RAMA Gaming House - Charitable Gaming at City of Mississauga, and thanks again to MAC, STEPS Public Art, Arts Etobicoke, Art Gallery of Mississauga, Visual Arts Mississauga, City Councillor John Kovac, Clarkson BIA, City of Mississauga and Mississauga Libraries for your support.
💌 Community engagement! 🥳🎆✨💖
The best thing that came out of Snail Mail is hands down all the community responses we received!!!! From the comments left on the Snail Mail sign up form to words of encouragement and handwritten mail… I can’t tell you how much it warms my heart to see the responses, and I know Anjalee, Ray, Amanda and MAC staff were all very excited every time more postcards came in. A huge thank you to everyone that participated or connected with us in some way 💖
Feast your eyes on this small selection of community cards! From left to right the cards are from Ivy, Shannon, Lyne, Lindsay, a mystery person (is this you???) and Berrin
If you haven’t already… CHECK OUT THE COMMUNITY GALLERY HERE
I added clickable links to all the Instagram profiles I could, and tried to put a name to every card that came in. There were a few unsigned cards, so if you spot a mistake or a mystery card is you let me know!! There were many people excited to further connect with the Snail Mail community so I hope you browse and find a new friend ٩(^ᗜ^ )و ´-
Community cards are also shared in some reels you can view in batch one, two, three and four. I also did an unboxing of a Snail Mail package here
I can’t say enough thanks to our community for being a part of this project! ヾ( ˃ᴗ˂ )◞ • *✰
Stop motion animation 🤹🏻♀️
From the beginning I knew that I wanted my card to include a stop motion animation with paper puppets. Shadow puppetry is something I’ve been exploring since my undergrad days but each time I revisit this idea there’s something new to learn and something different I want to try.
This time, I went fast and loose on the storyboarding and puppet building. I knew I wasn’t going to use projection or a tiered glass table to get depth/coloured acetate puppets.
I wanted to use all the excess latex paint from mural projects to paint right onto dura-lar (this I tried for Mother Tongue, should be similar enough to painting on glass right? and it worked out great). One thing to keep in mind is the paper can’t be handled too much or the paint will be scratched off.
I didn’t have a lot of time to craft jointed puppets, plus all that friction concentrated at the joints would guarantee the paint falling off. Soo since I had been painting often enough that it was faster for me to paint than draw and cut delicate puppets... my solution was to paint most of the animation frame by frame, and separate all the elements that need to move independently. The dura-lar was clear, this also helped because excess paper around the edges of the paint didn’t have to be cut super accurately. This resulted in sheets of frogs and flowers like this:
Once I had all my pieces cut and numbered and ready to go along with the board I was planning to use to pin everything to and the camera, I decided this set up didn’t feel right. I didn’t want to photograph and edit hundreds of photos like I’ve done before before animating, and I had gotten a little precious with the paper and didn’t want to poke holes.
I cut the backdrops so they would be the right size to fit in my scanner. Used some painters tape on the back of all my pieces or out of frame to get everything sitting the way I wanted before scanning every frame. I fiddled with the scanner settings for a bit to get all the colours looking the way I liked and this saved me from having to colour correct anything later on.
There are 196 unique scans, and parts were reused to make backgrounds for the the opening and ending credits on top of which I digitally illustrated the text. After this it was a lot of repetitive cropping, scaling and small adjustments, rescanning a couple mistakes here and there to complete the animation. You can see a full scan here, with the painters tape holding things out of frame and the edges of the dura-lar cut outs.
This approach actually worked out pretty well. In all my papercut experiments this has had the best colour payoff, and the texture of the paint (some of it has some grit too) really shows through. There’s a bit of depth achieved in the layering although that can be pushed further in the future.
With the animation done, and one frame picked out as the image for the postcard it was time to attempt the augmented reality part of things.
Augmented reality 🤖👾
One of my goals with this project was to learn about augmented reality. I wanted to try out new techniques and programs on a small scale, with the intention of potentially applying what I learn to large-scale public art projects in the future!
After some research, the two programs I chose to use were Artivive and Mental Canvas. I’ll touch on Artivive first since that’s the one I used to embedd the stop motion.
ARTIVIVE
I’ve seen Artivive used before by Arts Etobicoke and The Junction BIA on different window art projects, it’s also one that had a simple interface. I definitely wanted something easily approachable for my first try. The mobile app is what you use to view the artwork, and that’s free. Asking people to download and use an app is already an obstacle, I definitely didn’t want price to be a concern too. On my end I used a portion of the grant money for a limited subscription, and through my Artivive account I was able to upload my stop motion animation (video) and the corresponding image I wanted the video linked to (the postcard artwork/animation frame).
I remember Erin McCluskey mentioning something about your image needing enough contrast/recognition points for it to work with Artivive so I definitely kept that in mind during the process. Didn’t bump into issues there so thanks Erin!
Once everything was set up I tested it and my phone was able to recognize the postcard image on my screen and superimpose the video on top… but the real test was would it work on the printed artwork???? The answer is yes it did, phew! ₍^ >ヮ<^₎ .ᐟ.ᐟ Here’s a youtube short of demonstrating how you’d experience Ribbit in a Thicket in augmented reality using Artivive
Mental canvas
As for Mental Canvas, this was something that popped up in my instagram feed and bookmarked to try out one day. This was way before I thought of Snail Mail. It also requires a subscription (thank you MAC grant) and you need to draw a bunch of 2D layers to build a 3D landscape in the app. Working/thinking in 3D is not my forte, it’s difficult to consider perspective or imagine something sculptural in my mind’s eye. But the idea of being able to work flat and have the tool assist in placing my drawings in a 3D space was appealing.
For Summer Walkabout I actually did go on a walk in Mississauga. I brought a camera and took snapshots of little plants and every I found interesting, mostly plants and a few small landmarks. From a folder full of images I picked my favourites to illustrate. I could have drawn everything directly in Mental Canvas but I didn’t want to relearn how to draw using a new tool just yet — so I did all my drawing in Procreate and imported PNGs into Mental Canvas. I also went fast and loose with the artwork here (“loose” is something I’ve actively pursued in my artwork for ages). It was meant to be an impression of the things I saw rather than a perfect recreation, I could have easily just used the photos for that.
Anyway, a bunch of illustrations later I had another folder of images to work with that looked like this:
From here it was a lot of playing around in Mental Canvas to get everything imported and scaled properly before adding dimension by rotating or pushing/pulling a layer in space. It took some getting used to but there’s plenty of tutorials built in and many more online.
When all the elements are in position, you can manually move through the space by scrolling/zooming with your fingers and take snapshots using the camera button at the bottom of the screen. These snapshots can be arranged in whatever order you like and when you press play Mental Canvas can zoom through the scene to show you each snapshot in sequence, essentially animating the scene for you. My only issue was the png files were too large, and there was so many of them that it crashed the programs a few times. I should check the limits but go a little smaller and not print-ready file sizes and you should be fine 😅
What I like about this app was the fact that when the scene is published, viewers can access it via a link/QR code and view the sequence you saved, but they can interact with the images and experience the landscape by scrolling/tapping/clicking too! I thought it was a nice way to capture an ephemeral walk and share it with others.
Through both AR artworks I share a little moment in nature, and a different way to experience it. All wrapped up in the mail and delivered to you through Snail Mail. Both of these artworks are ephemeral in that they will only be around for a short period of time. It won’t be the same experience that original Snail Mail recipients got but you can still view the documentation for Ribbit in a Thicket, Summer Walkabout (flythrough and documentation) and Summer Walkabout (interactive web-scene) online.
future goals (just putting this out into the world) ✨✨✨
Snail Mail season 2!
Full scale murals combined with stop motion animation augmented reality?!?!?!?
Public art projects/exhibitions incorporating an immersive experience like Summer Walkabout but on a larger scale?? Viewers could navigate the artwork and be in the artwork, right?
A year long pen pal project where two people or a small team trade artworks back and forth and keep responding/reiterating them that results in a publication with the entire series. Nudge nudge Katika, I will write a grant for us eventually I promise
That’s all I’ve got for now, that was a long long blog that took a long time to write. Honestly months of stewing over this, but I feel a bit more refreshed now that it’s all out there. If you’ve made it to the end, thanks for sticking with me! Sending you (reader/new Snail Mail friends) creative juices and positive energy for the year ahead.
As always, if you’ve got any comments or questions about Snail Mail or this post I would love to hear it! Send me a DM here or an email here
Cheers,
Linh
