Painting the Grow Box mural

When team make:good started working on activating the Vincent Street Hub we knew that in addition to greenery, we wanted to add some artwork along the dark blue hoarding at the back of the plot to brighten up this space, now known as Grow Box.

Before

While the font we picked for Grow Box logo is the strong and sturdy looking Chivo Bold, the brand illustrations are slightly more whimsical, including a mix of waving fictional flowers with curving stems, paired with bold fruits and vegetables that one day we might see growing in the Grow Box garden. It was these illustrations we picked to take centre stage in a mural on the blue hoarding. At the Canning Town fun day, we also ran a ‘flower design’ activity with local kids to help us design the mural, some of which we adapted and included in the final artwork.

We included some of these co-designed flowers among the following panel mock-up, and when the design was given the go-ahead, we started to plan the big task of painting.

To help us draw the design at large scale, we printed out A3 versions of each panel overlaid with gridlines to guide us on what goes in each square. Paint, brushes, rulers, dust sheets, sun cream and all other equipment acquired, we started painting on July 30th, one of the hottest days of the year!

Despite only one member of our team having any mural painting experience, spirits were high as we started marking out our grids on the panels. Our first setback came as we realised the panels were shorter than initially thought - but with a bit of maths and adjusting the grids (twice), we worked it out and were ready to start sketching the design. The second setback was the speed at which our pencils were melting, which meant drawing a few lines and then having to sharpen the pencils into a point again, and again and again.

We followed a method of drawing out shapes, wiping off mistakes and redrawing - freehanding mostly but using metre sticks for straight lines, or grabbing a plate from the kitchen for circular shapes. It wasn’t easy, with some panels proving more difficult than others i.e. the panels with a trellis behind the flowers, but we grew in confidence, methodically blocking out large areas of colour, waiting for the paint to dry (which didn’t take long due to the heat) and doing any necessary touch ups / second coats. Overall it took the team three full days to finish!

I think I speak for the whole team when I say we all really enjoyed it, and even felt a bit sad when the mural was finished because it had been so much fun painting together. It was really satisfying seeing the fruits of our labour (pun intended) slowly appearing and the artwork as a whole taking shape. We look forward to our next mural painting project, whenever that may be - but we will make sure it doesn’t happen during temperatures above 30 degrees!

After