David Litchfield Illustration

The Monsters Of Bedford Big Draw 2011

I mentioned in a previous blog how my home town Bedford has recently had a resurgence in creativity and cool things suddenly seem to happening on my doorstep. Well this past weekend there was another example of this as Bedford played host to the ‘Monsters Of Bedford’.

The event was set up by Kayte Judge and Erica Roffe of the ‘We Are Bedford’ group (who seem to be behind a lot of the cool things happening in Bedford at the moment!) and it was part of the ‘Big Draw’- a nationwide campaign to get people-young and old- drawing.

Once again, Kayte and Erica took over one of the empty shops near the town centre (which, incedently, there appears to be less and less of at the moment- another reason for Bedfordians to be happier!) and we began setting up the space as a workshop for drawing.

Myself and six other incredible local illustrators (Alsdair Bright, Marissa Straccia, Katy Daynes, Scarlett Tierny, Andrew Foster and Rachel Elizebeth Lovatt) came together to help run the workshops and create a Monster Map of Bedford. The plan being that people would come in and draw their monsters and stick it on our map.

We got the ball rolling by painting some of our own monsters the day before as well as creating Monster Dice (to help people decide what part of the monster to draw) and devising over great challenges such as creating monsters using stich and collage.

Again, lots of people offered to help in the build up to this event with people paint the walls and tidying up the before we got into the shop , as well as distributing flyers and posters. Andrew made some brilliant badges and organised the posters and postcards. Incredibly we also got a huge stack of Beano comics delivered for the event from Mr Mike Stirling the chief editor of the comic and the illustrator Pete Fowler offered one of his drawings up as a prize for the best Monster drawing.

The actual day of the ‘Monsters of Bedford’ completely whizzed by in a blur of people, pens, scissors and creativity (and of course a selection of completely bizaar, scary and just plain odd Monster creations). Myself and the other illustrators had great fun in assisting people of all ages in the creation of their Monsters.

People stayed for hours and were just drawing for the fun of it.

The great thing about drawing monsters is that there are no rules and you can pretty much draw whatever you want.

This creative freedom is something anyone under the age of 10 always feels. Don’t think too much about it just draw whatever comes to mind.

Today the adults took their inspiration from the kids and let their imagination run wild. People who hadn’t drawn for years had been granted permission to let their long buried creativity rear it’s head again.

By the end of the day the Monster Map was completely covered.

As the last of the Monster Creators left the workshop and it was time to lock up Kayte told us group of illustrators all to enjoy the ‘warm fuzzy feeling’ we were all now experiencing. And I still am enjoying that feeling 3 days later.

What a brilliant day. x