Tyler Watts’ palette is a plastic crate filled with thousands of post-its.
His paintings are windows.
Over the past five years, the Letcher County math professor has earned a reputation for his massive, pixelated designs that turn ordinary windows into stained glass-like murals. He is best known as “The Post-it Picasso” and his work has appeared on Good Morning America, KET, and even a Walmart corporate convention. But more often than not, his portraits of Charlie Brown, Super Mario, The Grinch and so many others materialize line by line on buildings in the mountains of eastern Kentucky.
There is an undeniable and unusual magic in the characters he creates.
He uses these projects to teach mathematics to his students.
“It brings the program to life,” he said.
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See math come to life in the form of massive wall art
Below the colored paper squares are lessons in repeated addition and estimation. Building pictures from Post-it notes is essentially coloring a picture on grid paper. If it takes 16 Post-its to go from one edge of a window to the other, how many squares would it take to fill the entire board? Then, once his students have that number, they use a similar equation to figure out how many of each color they need.
It’s not uncommon to see Watts’ students on the floor in his classroom at Letcher Elementary, following the grid of tiles and creating their own shapes and designs on a much smaller scale, but once a year, he devotes an entire unit to the production of a mural. They trace the design together and blow it up on the projector to make the estimates. His students help him figure out how many packets of each color he needs.
“Kids have a big part in it, and when they’re excited about it, it’s great,” Watts said. “Especially when they see the math come to life.”
When he started using Post-its to teach five years ago, his students helped him load supplies into the virtual shopping cart on Amazon. Finally, Post-it notes the parent company, 3Mwho owns a manufacturing facility in Cynthiana, took an interest in Watts’ work and donated the supplies he needs to keep his momentum going.
“It’s amazing to see the inspiring creations people create using our products,” Erica Schiebel, senior marketing communications specialist for Post-it Brand, said in an email. “We’ve long been a tool used to express yourself, whether it’s writing down your next idea or callback, or creating something amazing like Tyler does using our colorful products.”
A quick scroll Watts Instagram shows he can stick a little magic just about anywhere. He originally had the idea of making Post-It art from pinterest, he said, and much to his wife’s confusion, he tried it on a whim on his living room wall. From there, he sketched at the school where he taught, then took on projects at local libraries and businesses. Eventually, he would like to do a logo for a sports team, but that opportunity hasn’t presented itself yet.
His largest canvas to date is on Estelle Campbell Center for the Arts at Alice Lloyd College where the lobby windows are over two stories high. In 2021, he created a huge image of his daughter’s favorite scene in How the Grinch Stole Christmas. The Grinch took 16 connecting windows as he watched sweet little Cindy Lou Who, who tried to give him an ornament.
Jennifer Hall, Director of Marketing and Communications at Alice Lloyd, enjoys seeing Watts’ work evolve. From outside the building, you can see the image forming in a slow, steady pattern as the blocks of color appear one by one – almost like watching letters turn into words on a page.
“Murals bring a lot of joy to campus,” Hall said. “As we decorate the campus for the seasons, Tyler’s murals are something we can’t go to the store and buy. They add a personalized touch to the campus that only he can create.”
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Something “positive” after a year of tragedy
Watts was back this year on the Monday before Thanksgiving. He had completed the most difficult part the previous night when he crouched on the floor and assembled the first rows that made up the bottom. Once he is able to stand, he is able to move through each ssclic, ssclic, ssclic to remove a Post-it from its pile and attach it to the window. As soon as the mural grows overhead, however, the process slows down again. He can only apply post-its as quickly as the pod lets him clear the wall.
Watts hoped he would be finished the next morning, and he far exceeded his own expectations. By the end of the night, Ana, Elsa and Olaf from “Frozen” were 17 feet tall and smiling out the windows. With the lights inside and the dark mountain sky outside, from the top of the hill overlooking the school, the three of them could be seen.
Watts couldn’t wait for his students to see him and know they had something to do with it.
Children can say “I did that”, he says smiling.
This year it was bigger than usual.
this summer, 13 counties in eastern Kentucky have been hit by historic flooding. Watts and his students were supposed to start the school year in early August, but weren’t able to return to class until mid-September. Many of his students and their families lost everything they had.
Watts’ house was spared, the flood crept into his yard and inches from his door, but he never entered.
So while the community was cleaning up and trying to start over, Watts was packing up his Post-its and trying to make people smile. He created Post-it murals along Main Street in downtown Whitesburg. Letcher County needed something to look at that wasn’t waterlogged furniture and destruction.
Now his students have seized the opportunity to do the same.
“I have the best kids in the world, really, those kids are amazing,” he beamed. “They all have the best personalities, but they just want to put something positive out there because they know what our county went through, and all of eastern Kentucky, with the flooding. I think they just kinda bought into that. kinda more just to put something shiny in the community.”
Columnist Maggie Menderski writes about what makes Louisville, southern Indiana, and Kentucky unique, wonderful, and sometimes a little weird. If you have something in your family, your city, or even your closet that fits this description, she wants to hear from you. Say hello to mmenderski@courier-journal.com or 502-582-4053.
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