illustrative signageWales Millennium Centre asked me to create illustrative signage, in the form of a large mural, to celebrate the support of Dyfrig and Heather John Charitable Trust for one of the arts centre’s important spaces.

Dyfrig John has a love for the Preseli mountains, and so the room was renamed The Preseli Room / Ystafell y Preseli, and I was commissioned to create a large artwork that reflected the feel of the mountains. A wonderful project – but I had only a week to do it!

For me, the Preselis are colourful, rainy mountains, wild and natural and scattered with stone circles and burial chambers. They are the source of the huge blue dolmens from which Stonehenge was built. I wanted to capture this colour, this wilderness. I worked with watercolour paints, blending different colours together on variously textured papers, creating interesting effects as various pigments ran and clashed and feathered together.

creating the watercolours

I sent over various options and using the Centre’s own font (famous for being on the frontage of the building) I played with different ways of displaying the name of the room bilingually. The Centre’s team chose their favourite and I scanned in the watercolour at 2000dpi. The artwork was printed and installed by Semaphore.

preseli_wallart_whole

The Centre reported that Dyfrig and Heather John were thrilled with the mural and said it’s transformed the room from a bland space to something far more vibrant.

preseli_mural_detail

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