How do you get nearly 600 children to participate in a school mural project? That was the challenge to be tackled when Hallfield Primary School in Bayswater invited me to come and fill some empty display boards in one of their curving corridors. The school was designed in 1951 by architect Denys Lasdun to be filled with light, curved spaces and tree-filled courtyards – it is a real gem. Lasdun’s original concept drawings for the school showed the classrooms as leaves, dining area as pea pods and hall space as a flower. This seemed a good starting point for the mural – a black and white outline over blocks of colour, with a leaf for each class just as Lasdun had planned – except that now there are 24 classes in the school.

Over the last couple of weeks the teachers have been working with their classes to make leaves using different media and carefully controlled colour palettes so hat the resulting leaves could be divided into four seasons. The result was hundreds of miniature works of art, in pastel lines over painted patterns, printed from real leaves, in pen, collage and chalk. I used hairspray to fix chalk and pastels, but charcoal was a bit more challenging. I’d also recommend checking any marker pens for bleed first. Having painted the background shapes I then used pva to glue all the small leaves within the big leaves – and now it’s finished.

I’d been at the school in February for a drawing project and it was lovely to be remembered by lots of the children. I also enjoyed hearing them rehearse their school production of ‘Skellig’ while I worked.

I’ve just finished a big mural project at St Paul’s C of E Primary School in Hook, near Chessington.

The project began with three days working with the whole school, class by class, creating colurful birds, leaves, flowers and buildings using a variety of media from acrylic to collage and coloured pencil.

Year 2 created some amazing collage vehicles, while Year 3 drew their own homes with great detail and a dash of imagination:

Other year groups experimented with colour mixing to create dozens of different shades for bricks and leaves, year 4 drew beautiful birds and year 6 worked in groups to make large collage/drawings of key buildings in or connected to the area, including Southwark Cathedral as a focal point.

I painted their drawings onto the boards and collaged on the cut out bricks, then added all the richness of bird and plant life, as well as the homes and vehicles that the children created (including an unfeasibly large number of tanks!).

It’s the third time I’ve worked at St Paul’s and it was lovely to recognise so many children and to see how their creative work has developed over the years.