Paint the Streets

It's great to get a ‘Paint The Streets’ group going in your local group as soon as possible. Paint The Streets is an ongoing campaign to cover the streets of the world with rebellious colour, posters, murals, subvertising and street art that share our message and promote the rebellion. There are loads of resources, templates, tutorials and downloadable artworks to get you started. Once you’re up and running you can get creative and create your own posters and campaigns using the extinction rebellion design pack. 

The best way to get started is to create a flyposting group and organise a night of flyposting around your local area. These can become regular monthly / weekly trips and they’re a great way to get people doing their first bit of disobedience. 

WHAT YOU’LL NEED

• Artwork for your posters. Check out this google drive full of designs ready to download 
• A print shop to print them. Its generally best to get them professionally printed or find a friendly local artist who can do screen printing. Home printing doesn’t normally look as good!
• Buckets and large cheap paint brushes and / or rollers 
• Homemade wheat-paste glue. All you need is white flour, water and heat. Follow this tutorial here.
• Clothes that you don’t mind getting sticky and having to put through a hot wash.

PREPARING FOR THE ACTION

1. Get all your interested rebels into a Paint The Streets signal, whatsapp or telegram chat 
2. Assign 2 or 3 people to make the wheat paste and bring large quantities of it ready made to the meeting place. 
3. Have a meeting of creative people to decide what artwork you’re going to print. If you’re building up to a big action you might want to make posters advertising the date and time of it. 
4. Consider setting up a ‘challenge’ to make it more fun. Ideas for a challenge include: 

• Who can flypost the most posters in one hour / one night 
• A prize for the funniest placement of a poster (over a billboard or similar)
• Who can cover the biggest area of your town etc.

DOING THE ACTION 

1. Get everyone to meet together beforehand for a briefing. A warehouse, garage, or large kitchen is best. It's important to do the action once it's dark, but not so late that it will deter people from taking part.
2. Put people into pairs or threes and give them a briefing and assign them a share of posters and a bucket of glue. Agree a time to meet back there again (1 or 2 hours later recommended so it's not exhausting). If you’ve got a lot of people you might want to have a map of the area open and divide up areas between different groups so people are covering different areas of the city. 
3. Ideally have a piece of wood with you to do a demonstration of how to effectively stick on a poster so new rebels get the idea. 
4. Brief people on the kind of locations to target (bus stops, billboards, walls in visible and busy places (during the daytime)) and places to avoid (small or independent businesses, privately owned houses, buildings with heavy amounts of security, signs with essential road safety messages) 
5. Go out and flypost! For speed, have two people working together. The first person applies a first layer of glue on the wall a bit bigger than the size of the poster. The second person puts the poster on top of it and wipes their hand over it until it's completely flat to the wall with no air bubbles. The first person then applies a thick layer of glue over the top. If you’re in an area that’s heavily policed then having a third person to act as a look out can be helpful. 
6. Get everyone to meet back at the starting point and an agreed time for a fun and relaxed debrief. Have some food and drink to share and get everyone to take turns talking in a circle or small groups about how the experience was for them. Make sure people who have never broken the law before feel valuable and supported and non looked down on by more experienced rebels. 
7. Get people into the shared chat and plan another paint the streets sessions in a few weeks time.