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Milton Primary — Murals & Augmented Reality
Children’s ideas became connected habitat murals, from underwater scenes to Welsh woodland. A later sunflower mural supported Milton’s Ukrainian pupils and families. Then a separate project opened the walls up again, as children made animation, sound and video to bring the paintings to life.
Location: Milton Primary School, Newport
Scale: approximately 120 metres of exterior mural work
My role: Lead artist; design development; mural painting; digital and AR guidance
Participation: pupils across the school contributed ideas and artwork
Later phase: Arts Council of Wales-funded augmented-reality project
Follow the story from painted habitats to augmented reality ↓
Starting with the children’s ideas
The school wanted to transform large areas of the exterior buildings with artwork that would bring colour to the site, support learning and reflect the children’s own work. The initial murals explored a range of habitats, from underwater environments to Welsh woodland, using pupils’ own ideas and artwork.
My role was to take a very large amount of pupil-generated material and turn it into a coherent professional mural without losing the sense that the work belonged to the children. Across the project, ideas and visual material came from different year groups and were developed into a long series of connected exterior paintings.
From sketches to a resolved mural
The interesting part of a school project like this is not simply collecting drawings and putting them on a wall. The job is interpretation: finding the strong visual ideas, deciding what can work at architectural scale, building rhythm across a long elevation and keeping enough of the children’s authorship visible for them to recognise their contribution.
The first phase connected different habitats across the exterior walls. A second mural phase featured sunflowers in support of Ukrainian children and families: Milton was a hub school for many Ukrainian pupils.
Then the wall became a digital canvas
After the original painting project, the school secured Arts Council of Wales funding for Bringing Art to Life with Augmented Reality. Under my guidance, pupils explored ways of extending the physical artwork with animation, sound and video that could be accessed through everyday devices.
That changed the role of the mural. Instead of being a finished object that the children simply looked at, it became something they could add to, reinterpret and activate. The project introduced them to the relationship between physical artwork and digital media, while keeping the painted wall as the anchor.
“Andy helped us to take our initial sketches and artwork into works of art that would enhance the building.”
Milton Primary School project presentation.
Keeping the children inside the creative process
The first mural phase translated a large amount of pupil-generated material into one coherent visual system at architectural scale. The later AR phase then opened the work back up, giving the children another genuine creative role through animation, sound and video rather than adding technology as a decorative extra.
Further project context
Original Milton Primary portfolio item ↗
Newport Medieval Ship — Anamorphic Mural