Peace of Art: Women only Street Art group is back for 2019

Peace of Art is a street art group which takes place in the courtyard at Baggator.

We meet some Sunday afternoons, please email aumairah@baggator.com if you would like to join us.

Exclusively for women and girls (11yrs +), the sessions aim to teach street art skills, encourage creativity, and also brighten up the courtyard with beautiful visuals and positive messages to inspire and empower people.

My name’s Emily, and I help run the classes. I’m a graphic designer and lettering artist with a passion for large scale murals. You might have seen one of them already in the courtyard on the end of a shipping container, it says ‘You do you’. You can see what I’m up to on instagram – I’m @emilyjoyrich.

We started the sessions towards the end of last summer to encourage women and girls to experiment and get creative in the form of street art. Recently the sessions have started again for 2019. On Sunday we started a mural which we had been planning and practicing for a while – a field of poppies. We started out by dividing the wall into two halves – spray painting the bottom part green for grass, and the top blue for the sky.

We layered red on top to add poppies to the grass. Starting at the horizon line, we sprayed areas of red in the distance as though there were lots of poppies further away. Slowly we started making the poppies larger and further apart, then we tackled the foreground.

This was the trickiest part, and the part which we had been practicing on other walls in the courtyard. We used stencils of petals and sprayed red with a hint of black to make the flowers. We added stalks and leaves, using some more stencils which we had made last year.


The mural isn’t quite finished but we made a good start – keep an eye on our wall to see how it develops.

Over the next few months we’re aiming to produce some more murals in the courtyard, add some signposting in the form of text and arrows near the gate, and paint a yellow brick road guiding people through the gate into the courtyard to make it feel more welcoming.

So come and join us if you fancy, we meet on Sunday afternoons at Baggator, weather and availability dependent! Speak to Aumairah or email me at hello@emilyjoyrich.com if you want to know more.