The Lunar New Year on Friday February 12 ushers in the Year of the Ox – and to mark this festive occasion of Chinese New Year, Adelaide artist Elle Dawson Scott has been on Flinders’ Bedford Park campus this week preparing a giant mural for staff and students to have fun colouring in.

The artwork has been applied to the glass window along the eastern wall of the Flinders Hub’s  ground floor, with the artist creating a temporary window mural in bold outline for everyone to colour in.

It forms part of a larger Lunar New Year celebration at Flinders from 11am to 3pm on Friday, that includes a lion dance performance, traditional Chinese dance, Chinese calligraphy and a multicultural costume show. Each Flinders student will receive a red pocket envelope with one food voucher by registering via an Eventbrite link.

The Lunar New Year mural is the largest window artwork that Elle has worked on, having previously completed murals on several cafe windows around Adelaide, including Trouble and Strife on Goodwood Road. “These murals are a great community morale-boosting exercise. It’s fun and allows everyone to join in,” she says.

“This large mural required a lot of planning to get it just right, but it’s been a lot of fun,” says Elle. “It’s nice to have a clear theme – and we’ll be using a limited colour palate with red, gold, green and white, to keep everything nice and simple, and make sure it’s not too intimidating for anyone to join in and participate.”

The mural will include outlines of many traditional Lunar New Year symbols – the lucky fruits of oranges and mandarins, lanterns, an ox and envelopes that Elle hopes people will colour in red, for extra good luck.

Elle took about seven hours to prepare the mural and her work has been captured as a time-lapse video to promote the event to students via YouTube and Flinders’ social media platforms.