The colours of Pill Carnival – vibrant streetart tribute

This mural was commissioned by Heddlu Gwent Police to commentate the career of Val Bryan, after 30 years of service.
We went through many designs before I was able to steer it towards this idea.
The image depicts the 2022 Carnival Queen (Lexi) and scenes from Pill Carnival, including a giant flag costume.
The scene on the left shows Val chatting to members of the community.

You can see some of the photos and imagery used to create the final design in the gallery below.

This mural is just off Commercial Road, and is a short walk from my Windrush Mural

It was a tough place to be paining. 80% of the people loved it and 20% had some axe to grind. I got abuse for it being too ‘woke’ and multicultural. I had grief from people who didn’t like the order of the flags, and which countries appeared to be getting favourable positioning in the design. I got pulled up on the inclusion and the prominence of the police.

Half way through the design the whole image was defaced with metre high lettering attaching the carnival queen and 2 weeks after completion somebody threw a tin of white paint at her image. The council kindly came to clean it off, but unfortunately blew off a lot of the render, damaging the mural further! However, definitely better than the white paint damage…