It’s been a busy weekend, finishing up the playful mural design for Growing21’s shipping container on the LINK, a semi-wild space undergoing a transformation into a community growing and play space. Possibly my largest painting job to date, painting five sides (including the roof!) of a 40 foot long container.

We developed ideas for the design through some playful workshops with the Ruchazie Pantry volunteers and passing kids and young people, exploring ideas for signage, and bold and colourful designs. Most important for the volunteers was that this felt like a welcome to everyone, the vision is that this can be a space for everyone locally to access and make use of – so we added ‘welcome’ in a collection of languages suggested by the voluntary team.

I’ve been promising myself (and can likely be quoted at any of our regular Dumfries signwriting squad meet ups) to improve my hand drawing for lettering, so for this one, partially because of the scale, I hand drew the lot. On our first weekend back in November we had a bunch of volunteers to help kick off the painting, and it was joyful to see everyone getting stuck in and having a go. Since then, I’ve been chipping away at the rest, with support from Freya at Lateral North, Mia tripping it up the road with me and the good folks in Ruchazie Pantry keeping us supplied with hot drinks and biscuits.

Now we just need a bit of sunshine and a hint of Spring so things can really start to get growing!