Main menu

Pages

Kentucky's "Post-it Picasso" Tyler Watts Creates Massive Post-it Mural

featured image

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.

Tyler Watts is an Eastern Kentucky teacher with a unique habit of making murals out of Post-it notes.  He puts one on at Alice Lloyd College before Thanksgiving.  Nov. 21, 2022

More from Maggie:“I just had a child, I’m terrified.” How fatherhood helped this man kick a 13-year-old addiction

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.

Comments