St Cecilia’s 75 th Anniversary Mural

For this community art project, I was responsible for two boards that would form the middle section of the mural. This included the lettering of ‘St Cecilia’s’ against the multi-coloured background and the next board has ‘anniversary’ written on it with the school badge that includes an image of St. Cecilia.

Initially, I experimented with different coloured backgrounds like blue (the colour of the school’s uniform) to find a colour for the background. Once I knew we needed to incorporate the house colours (blue, yellow, green and red), I decided to use these in my background and used stripes because when we first visited the school, some of the children liked the idea of including patterns in the mural. I think the colours interconnecting with each other through the stripes and the fact they are layered works well as it shows a sense of how the school is connected and united as a school community. I think it stands out really well as the colours are bright and it makes the title stand out too.

This was a miniature outcome I made before I painted my board so I could see what it would look like before I started to paint:

The lettering of ‘St Cecilia’s’ and ‘anniversary’ turned out better than I expected because this was one of the parts of the mural that needed to be quite accurate. Before I painted this onto the mural, I practised using different fonts and through my research and websites like dafont.com, found that the fonts used in primary school murals were often elegant and sophisticated which is something I wanted to recreate since it is a celebration for the school’s 75th anniversary. When I spoke to the children at our second visit, they liked the first, third and last font. Amongst our class, we liked the 3rd font which was also popular with the students at St. Cecilia’s. They agreed with me that I should paint the letters thickly so that it could be visible on our boards rather than it being too thin. I think I have succeeded in achieving this because it is bold and

easy to read from a distance. I think the ‘St Cecilia’s’ was just the right size but it was difficult to make the anniversary big as it is a long word and I needed it to be able to fit on the board but I still tried to make this as bold and readable as possible.

We constantly developed ideas throughout this project. I decided to make a small-scale mock outcome of the mural using an editing program to try and see what it could look like. This is shown below. Making this has been useful as it has helped us make changes such as leaving the ‘75’ white to avoid it looking too bright and including technology for each decade to show technological development. The lines on the mural are a lot more accurate and there are more musical instruments, characters and musical notes. The use of block colours shows that through our findings, we have been influenced by other artists who specialise in murals such as Lynne Hollingsworth. Our research has therefore been a very important factor in this project as it leads to the refined, finished mural.

The rest of the class have worked on their boards for each decade and I think all the boards have gone well. Photographs were taken of the children jumping in St. Cecilia’s school and these were painted on silhouettes onto some of the boards. Megan painted some of these and they stand out really well whilst also incorporating our client’s needs that the children could be involved. I also like Clare’s drawing of silhouettes, the astronaut and the violin as one of the musical instruments. I think this works well with the idea of St. Cecilia as the patron Saint of music. Aprilette’s ‘Pacman’ and ‘Rubix cube’ are bright and will appeal to the children and Chloe’s Coronation Coin is a very good representation of the decade her board reflects. Including children’s characters like ‘Dumbo’ which Courtney-Jade painted and ‘Scooby Doo’ characters which were painted by Leah also means that the mural reflects what the children wanted. These are photos of my finished sections for the mural: