Saint Mary's Dragon at Beachcroft

The day after the opening night of the RWA show I headed down to the offices of Beachcroft for a spot of window drawing. I was still feeling pretty drained from the night before, but managed to get the head and arms of this beastie up. The offices are right near to Saint Mary Redcliffe, so decided to do a dinosaur based on it's sky rocket Gothic architecture.

Here's the original drawing I did for it and a couple of close ups...





I'm particularly pleased with the tail section which is made out of the spire.



It's a shame that I didn't have enough time to draw the back section on the windows. It was starting to get to me a bit being in there pretty much on my own for 6 hours or so with only the sound of air conditioning for company!

Brisuanadon at RWA!

On my last blog post I stuck up a few teaser pics showing the early stages of creating my Brisuanadon sculpture. The piece was indeed for the Crimes of Passion show at the RWA. Here's some more development pics and shots from the show!

Here's my original drawing of how I imagined the sculpture to look. I wanted it to look a bit like my Bristol Dinosaur, but with fewer complicated landmarks. I based it on the Clifton Wood/Hotwells arial of Bristol so as to get the Suspension bridge and Cabot tower in. The houses there also look like those found in Totterdown, which is an arial people see straight away when they come into Bristol Temple Meads train station.



The dino model was made as a collaboration with my model maker friend Matt Pugh. the dino started life in Matts workshop over in Trowbridge. The pics in my previous post show it as the wooden frame and with the plaster coating on it. There are also pics of the little houses that were made out of wood and primed. These were then brought over to my studio in Bristol where they were sprayed up in different colours. This was pretty tricky as alot of masking was required to do the roofs.



The dino itself made it's way over from Trowbridge next and was painted a rock grey colour and given a layer of turf flock for skin.



Then the little houses were added.



The bridge was added on and also it's funny frog like eyes.



While waiting for glue to dry on the dino I went up to the RWA and painted a wall piece that would go behind it. I decided to go for a blueprint type of design with lots of notes on each of the different sections of the beastie. These include things such as - 'Cider and toxic waste food inlet', 'Defensive tree spikes', 'Underfoot bass propulsion unit' and 'Sewage outlet'.



We worked right up to the last minute to get the model finished. I had bought all the N guage size model railway trees available in Bristol and luckily my supply of them ordered from the internet arrived on time!

The opening night was crazy and to be honest with you I found it all a bit much. I looked over the balcony at one point to see all the people queing in the street around Mr.Rowdy's painted rocks. My friends were among the people below and I took the opportunity to wave at them as if I was the queen.



.....and here's the finished beastie! It's around 1.5m long and mounted on a wooden base.





I'm really pleased with how it's turned out. I'm not sure what baby Felix makes of it all though.



All in all it was a great night, although it was difficult to get to the bar and I was glad to go and chill out down the pub afterwards. Big shout out to the RWA, FLX, Jono, Kath and all the artists involved.

It's well worth going to the exhibition if you can, otherwise check this footage of the opening night featuring my dino and me lurking around...

Brisuanadon W.I.P

W.I.P Gunship Swallow painting

Here's a pic of my nearly finished Gunship Swallow painting. It's a tattoo style Swallow made out of lots of small helicopter gunships. It compliments my Tank Heart piece that I featured also on this blog. They should be ready very soon - I'm getting quicker!