Blog & insights

I sat down with illustrator and printmaker Julia Allum to talk about her first large-scale mural, a colourful celebration of Wymondham painted on the town's old fire station.

Walk past the old fire station in Wymondham and you'll see a wall crammed with the town itself: abbey, market cross, railway, river and more. Look again another day and you'll probably spot something you missed. That's exactly what its creator intended.

"The mural includes 23 references to the town, some of which are more obvious than others," says Julia Allum. "The idea was to have an image people could walk past on several occasions and spot something new each time."

A style found by ignoring trends

Allum's work is instantly recognisable: bold, geometric, and flooded with colour, with a nod to the golden age of the travel poster. She says it took years to arrive at.

"It was only when I stopped trying to follow trends and just create what I liked that it began to develop," she explains. Her love of vintage design, especially the clean lines and simple shapes of art deco, runs through everything. But she's wary of copying the past. "Rather than creating a pastiche of this style, I take elements from it and mix them up with my love of geometry, shapes, and negative space to make images that are distinctively mine yet still have a little of that vintage vibe."

From illustration to screen printing

Art was never in doubt as a career. "I've been drawing and painting for as long as I can remember so I don't think pursuing anything other than art ever crossed my mind," she says. She chose to study illustration because she likes working within limits: "Illustration is visual problem solving and communication and I enjoy the challenge of answering a brief."

Her commercial illustration is created digitally in Adobe Illustrator using simple vector shapes, but printmaking came later, as a way back to making things by hand. Screen printing, a common way of reproducing mid-20th-century travel and advertising posters, felt like the natural fit. "I love the mechanical process of screen printing, breaking an image down into layers, working out how colours are going to interact, cutting stencils and finally pulling the prints."

Putting Wymondham on the wall

The brief for the mural was refreshingly open: "A bright vivid design that showcases Wymondham." It listed the town's landmarks and historical industries as starting points. Allum visited to get a feel for the place and "took lots of photos", then set about fitting it all together.

The result covers the Abbey and its ruined arch, Market Cross, the Green Dragon pub, the war memorial, Becket's Chapel, the town sign, the museum and station, the Heritage Railway and Ket's Oak. There's a market, a signpost pointing to local places of interest, Moot Hill, the River Tiffey, and a nod to flowers and green space. Historical industries such as brick making, agriculture and brush making appear too, along with the old fire station itself.

"It's obviously not an accurate recreation of the town but a colourful artistic representation," she says. She had intended to keep the design simple, with a limited palette, "however, I did get a bit carried away and the design ended up being far more complicated than I had originally envisioned!"

Two hundred hours on the wall

The design was worked up over a month, fitted around other projects. Mapping out and drawing took three days and painting took 13. All told, from blank page to varnished wall, it came to more than 200 hours.

The hardest part, she says, was the design itself: "Getting all the elements to fit together in an appealing and cohesive way took a lot of work." On the wall, the drawing was the trickiest stage. "Getting everything straight and level was time-consuming and all the lines did at times get rather confusing. Spending time on the drawing paid off though as it meant the painting was pretty straightforward."

Art for everyone

A print is something you choose to hang at home. A mural isn't, and Allum says that shaped her approach. "It's a privilege to be able to have my work out in the community for all to share," she says. "People choose art they want to display on their own walls, but they don't have that choice with public art, it is out there for all to see. For this reason it was important to me to try and create something to appeal to as many people as possible."

Her aim was "something positive to showcase Wymondham at its best": bright, cheerful, "contemporary but not abstract".

Birds, bridges and what comes next

Away from murals, Allum keeps returning to birds. "The sheer number of species and variety that there are offer an endless opportunity to play with colour, shape and pattern," she says. They're also her best-selling prints. Landmarks such as bridges, lighthouses and windmills draw her in for the same reason: "the structures offer so much to visually play with."

Though she's found herself drawn towards abstraction lately, she likes to keep a starting point to jump from, "and then explore abstraction within that."

Wymondham may be the start of something bigger. "I thoroughly enjoyed the whole process though so I'm hoping this will be the start of a new direction for me," she says. A few mural enquiries have already come in, and she's keen to do more: "I'd love to do something similar in other towns, and I'm open to any opportunities if a space needs brightening up somewhere."