Bramhope Primary School Mural

During the break over summer, I practiced my can control and spray painting techniques by taking part in a collaborative Mural. Me and a friend from Art and Design Interdisciplinary have a friend who's parents work closely with Bramhope Primary School just outside of Leeds. Unfortunelty the side of their building was defaced with some tags and they wanted someone to Cover the area, I thought this would be an ideal project to keep myself productive in terms of being creative and working with a deliverable other to print and web

I tried to treat this opportunity alike to that of a live brief, thinking about my audience context, content and time-frame.

Below are a few of our initial brainstormed Ideas and considerations and a few sketches to start to get subject matter flowing. Our main concern is our audience, being Primary school children so subject matter is going to need to be appropriate for their age group. We want to use some themes that the children can relate to, they have a conservation area and small allotment so fruit and vegetables, plants tree's and nature is going to be our first port of call.

 

 

The space we've been given to work with is a rather awkward area and stretches around a corner, also there a drainpipe that sits in the corner of the two walls so this is going to be a big consideration, we want the painting to interact with its surrounding environment so we're thinking incorporating the drainpipe could be very interesting.

So far our plans are to create a series of rolling hills, using the drainpipe as the basis for a tree trunk, then separating out each wall with a fading light to dark sky. Ideas for characters so far are Owl's, Birds and Bee's intertwined with foliage and vegetables in the foreground.

Our budget on Paint was something that would also have to be very well planned as certain shades would be used more than another and certain colours we would need more of. I got a selection of different greens as they would be heavily used in the foreground mixing brands of paint to try and get a really unique palette.

We started by brushing off all the dry brick and cobwebs from the wall then using multiple coats of paint we created a thick layer of white to work on top of.

Work In progress

Below is a series of photographs of the wall at different stages. We estimated to complete the painting over a frame of 5-6 days but due to typical British weather conditions it took us a little Longer, but after 10 days we were able to walk away satisfied.

 

 Final ResultI was really happy to the conclusion we came to with our mural even thought If I did it again there would be a few things I'd change, in terms of layout etc, But i guess that's just me trying to be a perfectionist. In September when the children start back at the Primary School we hope to go and do some mini interviews to see what they think of the work. I think this will provide a really neutral and naive point of view, especially from children of such a young age.