Newport Medieval Ship — Anamorphic Mural

From a portable backdrop to a permanent illusion

The commission began with conversations with Emma Newrick at Newport City Council about improving the family offer at the Ship. An earlier port scene I had made for the project had been popular, and the initial thought was to create a portable illustrated backdrop that could frame the children’s activity area and potentially travel to outreach events.

Once we started looking at the space, the idea became more ambitious. Rather than simply illustrate a medieval harbour, I wanted the ship to feel as though it was projecting out of the picture plane and into the warehouse.

Designing backwards from one viewpoint

An anamorphic image only works if the perspective is calculated for the place from which people will actually see and photograph it. That meant the design had to be developed around the real viewing distance, the narrowness of the visitor space and the position of the person posing in the scene.

I went back to the site to test camera angles and model positions. Toby Jones supplied digital 3D models of the Newport Ship, which I brought into my own workflow so I could change the ship’s angle and scale accurately rather than approximate it by eye. At one point I was testing the geometry in VR simply to understand how the illusion would sit in the physical space.

The composition was simplified as it developed: one more prominent ship at a dramatic angle, with medieval figures around it and details from the working shipyard — craftsmen, tools, planks and the visual language of a busy waterfront. The family dressing-up area could then become part of the experience rather than something separate from it.

The technical trick is there to serve the story

The perspective work is probably the most technically complicated part of the project, but I didn’t want the result to feel like a geometry demonstration. The point was to give visitors an immediate sense of the vessel as something enormous, inhabited and active — not just an archaeological object.

From the intended viewpoint, the distorted painting resolves into a convincing scene and the ship appears to occupy far more depth than the wall actually contains. Move away from that viewpoint and you begin to see just how stretched and engineered the image really is.

“It’ll be a great talking point and will definitely make a visual impact in the space.”

Emma Newrick, Culture and Heritage Team Manager, Newport City Council, during design approval.

A visitor experience, not just a mural

The project was developed specifically around interaction. Costumes sit alongside the scene so visitors can step into the composition and pose as part of the medieval waterfront. The nearby interpretation and digital reconstruction of the ship provide the archaeological detail; the mural does something different — it gives people a physical, memorable way into the story.

That combination is the point of the project: heritage interpretation, 3D modelling, perspective construction and mural painting all disappear into a visitor experience that feels simple enough to step into. The technical work matters because it makes the story more immediate rather than drawing attention to itself.

Further project context

Newport Medieval Ship ↗ · See the Newport Ship in 4K ↗ · Newport Medieval Ship online archive ↗

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