Team Pumpkin Boxing Mural
This Mural was created with help from the children and younger members at Team Pumpkin Boxing.
I was approached by Team Pumpkin boxing and the West Midlands Community Trust to manage a mural painting project for the Team Pumpkin Boxing Gym. I was told that the children and younger members had expressed a desire to create a large mural at their gym to inspire new and current members, rather than having bare walls. The youngsters had a lot of ideas, but did not currently have the artistic skills or confidence to turn them into a large collaborative mural.
The Pumpkin Boxing mural began its journey with a series of Art workshops. In the first workshop we began by sketching out some imagery that related to boxing. This could be anything from gym equipment for training to a boxing ring fight or images of people boxing.
I also wanted to find out what boxing and the Pumpkin Boxing Gym itself meant to these young boxers.
So i asked the group -
What does Pumpkin boxing mean to you?
What has Pumpkin boxing done for you?
The answers they shared with me are -
Community, Teamwork, Friendship, Respect, Encouragement, Good Humour and Fun
Discipline, Fitness, Positive Mental Health, Confidence, Better Lifestyle, Self Improvement, Personal and unique boxing style
For the second workshop i printed out a selection of line drawings with boxers throwing punches, and we explored how to express movement and impact with simple marks and lines.
I did a demonstration showing various ways to illustrate speed, body movement and punching. We also played around with flicking ink and paint.
The third workshop was all about collating some of the ideas from the previous 2 workshops, along with any fresh ideas, into a mural design.
I printed out a loose design to scale which allowed them to draw in any of their ideas. The thoughts and ideas that were shared while doing this workshop really helped to cement the overall design, and i was able to bring their ideas together into one design that everybody was happy with.
I then invited members of the gym along to a very active painting workshop where they were asked to throw, flick and splatter paint all over these boards to help create lots of exciting and expressive marks and shapes. This was so much fun, and it was great to see the joy on their faces as they threw paint with much enthusiasm and gusto! Funnily enough, they didn’t need any encouragement at all.
Over the next few weeks the mural design was painted with the help from members from the gym. They helped me to paint in the boxers and the boxing ropes using brushes and Acrylic paints. The original design of the mural included a boxer training with a punch bag, and someone training with focus mitts in the background of the mural, but as the mural started to take shape they asked me to exclude the background figures in training, and focus on the 2 boxers. We agreed this would have more impact in the overall design, and an audience was painted in to finish the scene.
Finally, a selection of words from the first workshop were painted onto the ropes by my daughter Daisy (12).
Team Pumpkin Boxing Mural in stages
