Cupcake Illustration: Waterstones Mural Group Project

We were asked by Hereford's Waterstones branch to help fill an awkward space on the wall as you go up the stairs. This was quite a challenge as there were a few light fittings and board obstructions. It was also a very tall space to fill.

Firstly we tackled it by deciding what we wanted to include in the mural. We decided upon the River Wye and Black Mountains as the tieing in point. We also wanted to include Herefordian themes such as:

Then we each took aspcts of the Hereford list and went away researching and developing these. As a group we decided that keeping the colour scheme generally pastelly in colour whould tie all the images together:

Blowing ink through a straw

Both Watercolour

With each persons areas we mapped out roughly the composition of the main boards:

After this I carried on developing my foliage:

Acrylic Painted Tree

Tree with leaves painted using finger prints

Following this furthur development was carried out and everyone was assigned a topic for their individual board. The theme of my board was the famous Hay on Wye book festival. I wanted to include the iconic deck chairs that are scattered around the festival.

Also having the books towering over the people really gave a feel of being emerged in a good story. That then led me into turing the one book into a house, with the windows as if they were cut out of the actual novel.

Overall the collabiration wasnt too stressful. However, the practicalities of moving the boards from B&Q was quite the challenge. Once we found B&Q we went in and ordered the sizes of the boards we would need in the correct size. Considering we were in a giant warehouse when choosing the MDF boards, they seemed relitively small against its back-drop of high celings and towering shelves. So once they were paid for, we had quite the shock attempting to get them into my car. Now i realise how small a Vauxhall Corsa is. We tried seats up, seats down, boot full, boot empty. But it was no good. Thanks to a kind stranger (with a slightly larger vehicle) we managed to get them closer to their final destination.

Then it came to creating our illustrations onto the boards. As i was trying to do so I encountered a SLIGHT problem. ALL the trees i had created for the mural were so slim and fiddley that they were impossible to scalple out in a reasonable time. Thus, the trees i created for the larger boards, of which there were many, they had to be simplifited. Testing felt tip on an already primed MDF board i found that by incredibly lightly spraying it after with fixative fixed the felt tip. Too much meant a run, but none at all could create smearing.

The making of the mural:

Suzi working on the main boards

This is my focus board once edited for continuity and flow with the other boards.

It includes Stephs woman reading in a deck chair and Rosanna's boy reading and cows.

I made sure I created the trees to get smaller the furthur back they went

The top half of the boards seemed complete. We decided it looked right as a group because of the mountainous blocks of colour linking the indevidual items up. The bottom seemed quite 'bitty' so we figured that 2 large blocks of colour would tidy it up.

Kim also touching-up and cleaning the white areas with emulsion

Rosanna pasting on extra illustrations

I contributed paint blocks of colours made the images less 'bitty' and combined them more into sections and filled the awkward spaces. It was nervracking but with a steady hand it worked. The white was touched up and the boards ready to ship to Waterstones.