Creating a mural
At last I can begin to share a few glimpses of the mural I’ve been creating with year 5 students from Crofton Junior School for Petts Wood Library in Bromley. The project was initiated by Librarian Jenny Hawke, with art materials funded by North Kent Decorative and Fine Arts Society.
I’ll be writing up a proper report of the project including some great pictures of the students in action, once the mural has been officially unveiled at the Library next Saturday (with the Mayor of Bromley in attendance!) – but until then, here are some details about the process and a few snippets of the final piece.
The key focus of the project was to involve the children as much as possible in creating the final artwork, and, as I hadn’t created a mural like this before, I came up with a cunning plan to use a combination of painting and découpage to fix the image onto a series of wooden boards that would be mounted on the library wall.
The project began with a visit to the school, working with the children to create their own characters to appear in the mural. The children were wonderfully enthusiastic and carried on drawing characters the following week. I then took the drawings home with me to scan, enlarge and enhance digitally, before getting the images professionally printed by Atom Gallery in North London. The prints looked amazingly rich and colourful, and the children was super excited to see their artwork blown up ready to be cut out and découpaged into the scene.
The next task was to get the children to visit the Library to paint the background of the mural. We used acrylic paint and a combination of brushes, sponges, stencils and even some trusty potato printing to create the scene. We only had an hour to get the entire 4.5 metre long mural painted so it was all hands on deck! Getting all 12 children simultaneously painting was quite a feat of organisation, but they absolutely rose to the challenge and worked really hard to create all the fab textures and free hand elements like the buildings and flowers.
Here is some potato-print shrubbery, complete with mini beasts.
Here’s Petts Wood Library.
The following week, we met up at the library again, this time to get gluing, and decoupage the characters and other printed elements onto the scene.
This bus was populated with the children’s self-portraits drawn on tissue paper so they could be cut out and pasted onto the windows. A coat of decoupage glue over the top ensured the tissue paper became transparent, and sealed the portraits in place.
Here it is découpaged in place.
This building was created by taking a scan of a pencil doodle from one of the children’s pictures, then adding in textures and layers in Photoshop before enlarging it, ready to be produced as a fine art quality giclée print.
I illustrated a flying saucer and added in one of the children’s robot characters as the pilot.
The last task was to coat the all the boards in acrylic sealant and leave them to dry. The boards will be mounted to the library wall this week, ready for the grand presentation event on Saturday. It’s been great fun working with the children, their teachers, and the librarians at Petts Wood. If anyone’s near Orpington and Petts Wood on Saturday 25th between 11 and 12 noon, do pop in and join us for cake and refreshments, drawing and book signing.
