Fresh Creative Co. were commissioned by Swansea City Council to produce a mural along the seafront facing wall of St Helen’s Rugby and Cricket Ground on Mumbles Road.
The mural forms part of a lottery funded public art initiative designed to improve local people’s knowledge of, and pride in their heritage, as well as to provide an experience for visitors to the area. The location was chosen for its connection to Dylan Thomas, at the site where he used to play cricket and spend time with friends; its design, amongst other things, includes the world’s first fare-paying passenger railway service, the iconic Mumbles tram.
PROCESS
We were first approached about painting this mural towards the end of last year and during the interim time, it has gone through a long and rigorous design phase, encompassing several different designs along the way before settling on the final design. Seen below is a mock up of one of the original designs that didn’t make the final cut.
The final design was a montage of different elements. As previously stated, the Mumbles tram found it’s place on the wall due to it’s heritage links to the area, whereas the cricketing murals were chosen with advice from Glamorgan Cricket supporters’ group, the St Helen’s Balconiers. St Helens Rugby football club were also consulted and provided us with the direction for the rugby part of the mural. Once these elements were in place we set about laying them all out into a cohesive design.
Once we arrived on site the first job was to lay a few coats of undercoat onto the wall to provide us with a good surface to work on. We then laid out the main elements of the Tram and the two cricketers with spray paint before giving the whole wall a coat of deep green gloss emulsion which would become the final background colour for the mural.
On top of this we marked out the rugby club shields, emblem and text using pounce patterns which we created off site in our workshop. Once all this was in place we finally began the long process of painting in all the features. These were done using a variety of different techniques. First off the Tram and the two cricketers, Alan Jones and Don Shepherd, were all painted freehand with spray paint. Both cricketers were Glamorgan legends; Don Shepherd took more first-class wickets than any other player who never played test cricket, while Alan, who played for Glamorgan for almost quarter of a century, holds the record for scoring the most runs for Glamorgan, and he is still their president today.
Meanwhile the emblem for the rugby club was painted with brushes and hand lettered, as was the text between the two rugby club shields which commemorates the achievement of Swansea Rugby club being the first ever club side to beat the Southern hemisphere ‘big three’, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand. The two shields which flank the lettering were painted with spray paint and had their finer detail finished off with paint markers.
FINISHED PIECES
This Mural represented a huge chunk of time for us here at Fresh Murals Co. Over the past year it’s gone through multiple iterations of the design before finally culminating in a four week long painting process. Now it’s finished it’s great to be able to look back at the project and feel happy with the final work, which indeed we do. Many thanks to Uplands councillor Irene Mann, who was instrumental in getting this project off the ground, as well as the St Helen’s Balconiers and Swansea Rugby club for their invaluable input into the design process. Below are images of the finished wall
As always we hope you’ve enjoyed seeing the process behind the creation of this mural and a special thanks to Cllr Irene Mann.
