A sea of colour and artistry will descend on Digbeth next weekend for the first City of Colours festival.

Organised by fledgling company Street Art Birmingham, the one-day festival is hoping to promote awareness of and encourage people to appreciate and engage in graffiti and street art.

Becci Wright, who co-founded Street Art Birmingham with her partner Karl Paragreen 18 months ago, told the Post she was inspired to launch City of Colours after enjoying similar festivals in London and Bristol.

"The company was initially set up to focus on promoting the local street art scene and artists in the city, and around Digbeth in particular, and quickly grew to a point where we organised art exhibitions," she said.

"We visited street art exhibitions in other UK cities but there is no large-scale dedicated festival of this kind in Birmingham, just a few smaller events."

The Custard Factory will act as the epicentre for the festival on September 6 but other venues such as pubs the Old Crown and Rainbow Arena will host events.

Ms Wright estimates around 5,000 will attend the various exhibitions and workshops which will focus on skills such as photography, graffiti, break dancing and DJing among others.

It has also signed up about 140 artists to attend including Inkie, who is one of the most renowned UK graffiti artists to have emerged from the 1980s and who finished second in the 1989 World Street Art Championship.

She added: "We have three main objectives for City of Colours. We want to use it as a platform to promote local, unknown talent alongside more established artists and see it as an excellent opportunity to push the scene in Birmingham.

"We also hope it will bring people together across the different parts of the city as outreach officers have been going into hard-to-reach communities to promote the festival.

"Finally, we want to improve the appearance of the local area around Digbeth. And we've already confirmed we will be doing another festival next year."