Making a Bristol Dinosaur

Back in February Andy Council and i ran a workshop for young people the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery as part of the Bristol Dinosaur Project. The initial plan was to design a dinosaur skeleton using cut out images of Bristol architecture and then collaborate on a large wall painting, but the plan went from 2D to 3D when we thought about painting directly onto a dinosaur skeleton instead. Inspired by my nephews Christmas present of a balsa wood 'build your own' stegosaurus, we went about building a much larger version of our own out of MDF.
The hard work the young people we worked with put into transferring their impressions of Bristol onto each piece of the MDF 'bones' became realised when we assembled the pieces and the new Bristol Dinosaur appeared. You can see photographs of the process of the project on the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery Facebook page.

By working in a new way and pushing our own ideas of how we could facilitate a 'street art' style workshop, we produced a sculpture that displayed 10 young peoples views of Bristol that came together to make one finished piece - a very successful collaboration! But there was one point when we needed to fill an hour with some idea brain storming, so i took a risk and got the collaborative free drawing going. The rules would be different this time though, draw anything with a theme of 'Bristol', use coloured oil pastels and silence is merely optional!
I'll let the images do the talking...

Free Drawing: The Images

It's been a couple of months since i've had the time to get this blog going, but i've been putting all the energies into the doing and a lot less into recording the reflecting. Over the next few weeks I'll be spending a bit more time writing up some of the projects i have been doing with all sorts of different people in Bristol and i'll endevour to get the results posted here.


Before that though, it feels wrong to continue without posting the images that accompany the previous Free Drawing post...