Calderglen Park Murals - Schools Project

I was commissioned by South Lanarkshire Leisure and Culture to run a schools project with St Andrews St Brides Secondary School in East Kilbride. I was to visit 3 x S2 classes across 2 workshop sessions to create some murals for a space in Calderglen Country Park.

The brief was to use imagery of plants, flowers and animals that are in the zoo area of the park to create 3 large boards (this later turned into 6) which would be created digitally and printed.

The trickiest part of this project was the lack of time I had with the pupils. They had to produce imagery to use in 3 large scale murals within 2 hours. I prepared some quick drawing exercises to get the students drawing and not worrying about perfectionism. We used reference images from a park visit to draw these.

Following all of the little drawings, we cut these out and placed them on large sheets of paper. The students had to work together as a team to place these in the best layout for visual impact. Here’s what they created:

Following this, I then took these drawings away and presented 3 concepts to the client to choose their favourite route. This was the concept sketch chosen:

It’s all of the students little drawings, placed together to make up a big mosaic image of flowers, plants and animals in Calderglen Park.

Something important to me was that every pupil that took part in the workshops was represented with one of their drawings.

The client loved it so much, the allowed budget for 6 to be made,

I’m not going to lie, it took me FOREVER! Ensuring all the line drawings were correct. Placing them so they locked together, getting the shape and colour perfect to look like the animals/plants. But it was soooo worth it!

Here are some close ups of each board: