Luckily, with help from various friends from our class, this job was made a lot easier, and the work was divided among ourselves. However, even with the extra help, we were still not the largest group, which meant we all had to work extra hard in order to finish the build within such a limited time frame.

I tried to help with the build in areas that I know I'm a bit stronger in, which meant I ended up painting quite a bit throughout the process (there was a large amount of painting required luckily enough!). My main focuses to begin with were painting doors and shelves, making sure these got enough coats to remain opaque and not patchy, as small details like this were likely to show up on camera later and limit the quality of the final piece. I also assisted with painting the three walls the yellow / mustard colour, eventually moving on to spend a lot of my time painting the design on the feature wall. Due to budgetary constraints the feature wall had to be all stencilled and hand painted, rather than properly wallpapered and so this required a mini team of people to actually carry out. It took time in order to make each oval shape within the layers as precise as possible. However there's only so much accuracy you can get with a human hand and so no design was completely perfect. Despite this I think the wall turned out as well as we could get it, and the inaccuracies added to the feel of the rustic, worn down cafe that we wanted. Doing the feature wall also meant I had to stand on ladders, which I'm not a big fan of, however I managed to face my fear in order to help get it finished!

Even though the build was quite a stressful time, it was also quite a lot of fun! I learnt a lot of new skills throughout the process, and definitely brushed up on some fine art skills! It was really nice seeing everyone coming together to start to bring the story of Debbie to life and I think what we were able to do in just a few days, really speaks for our hard work. Of course the set wasn't perfect, but then rarely anything is, especially when done by hand. However, with our limited time constraints and funds I think we did as best we could to make it look good.