Cleveland Natural History Museum

The second project in my Illustration class this semester was a bit different.  We were given the task of solving what would be a collage of our making about a place in Northern Ohio where you can go to on a weekend and then include the form of transportation you can use to get there.  We were allowed to choose anything we wanted to, and since earlier this year I went to the Cleveland Natural History Museum I picked that.

The Cleveland Natural History Museum was my favorite place to go to when I was a kid, so going back after about 10 years was a lot more fun than I expected.  The museum was found in 1920 originally and since then has grown to become one of the greatest natural history museums in America.  The museum is located on University Circle in downtown Cleveland, which is one of the most beautiful areas of the city.  A visit here at anytime, local to Cleveland or not, is definitely worth it.  Not to forget, within walking distance is the Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art and more.

Initially I started coming up with concepts that were a scene within the museum… but I wasn’t really enjoying where that was going.  I had a few sketches, but they all felt relatively static, so instead I made a list of what exactly is my more favorite features of the museum, Human History, Dinosaurs and Dinosaur fossils, Ancient Earth Trilobites, the Foucault Pendulum and the Planetarium.  Since the gigantic dinosaur fossils are a framework in themselves, I decided to build off of that concept and build my own giant dinosaur out of my favorite, and the most iconographic features of the museum.  This is an almost finished version of what I am planning on turning in:

You can click the image for a larger version.

If anything major changes I’ll post another version.  But for now I just wanted to get this out there while I was updating the layout of the site again.