A plain wall on the building that houses Invercargill's Fresh Start programme has been turned into a bold, colourful mural designed alongside the young people who use it.

Southland street artist Danny Owen, who paints as Deow, spent a couple of days with the Fresh Start group drafting a design that represented them before picking up the spray cans, the Otago Daily Times reported last week.

Fresh Start is a 10-week course run by the Invercargill Student Support Network (ISSN) for students who are finding school hard going. The network says the course draws on about 30 agencies to cover social, emotional, physical and mental health needs, and its aim is to send students back to school able to be, in director Elley Lineham-Peters' words, "the best they can" once they return.

The building's exterior had been plain, and the network wanted it to look more like a place for young people. It applied to the Creative Communities scheme, which paid for about two-thirds of the cost.

The finished design puts a young person wearing headphones at its centre. Around that figure are harakeke, a sky that could be read as sunrise or sunset to mark a new day, butterflies standing for hope and growth, and a Southland landscape.

Year 10 student Lucah McNatty, 14, said the group settled on flax as a plant native to New Zealand, and the colours and the eyes of the central figure were also deliberate choices.

Owen told the ODT that, for him, public art had never been just about putting paint on a wall, and that the project gave the students the chance to be part of something they could take pride in.

The ISSN applied for the Creative Communities grant itself. The ODT report did not say how the remaining third of the cost was met.

What sets the Fresh Start piece apart from a standard commission is the process: the students who will walk past the wall every day sat down with the artist first and decided what it should say about them, from the headphones on the central figure to the plant chosen to frame it.

Lineham-Peters described what the course offers as "wraparound support", and the mural now gives that support a public face.

The mural is on the Fresh Start building in Invercargill. The ODT report did not give a street address.