Dorset Museum

Illustration & Design for Dorchester's iconic Dorset Museum's new Inflatable!

When the Dorset Museum closed its doors for two years to work on major redevelopments all was not lost, as the museum now exists in inflatable form! I worked closely with the DM team to establish the look and feel for this project. They wanted to capture the true essence of this iconic piece of Dorset architecture whilst representing the new elements that will be part of it following the redevelopment. The Illustration needed to be accurate, to scale but also with appeal to its audience many of whom will be families and children.

We decided upon a hand drawn, pen and ink style using a natural yet bright colour palette. With such a huge collection inside the museum, it was quite a challenge to choose which objects should be included in the illustration, we wanted to include objects that represent all the wide and varied collections.

Everything was sketched in pencil first, either in person at the museum or using photo reference. The finished drawings were then scanned and the line-work and colour was worked up using flash and illustrator. Creating vector files allowed us to retain the hand drawn style whilst still being able to scale the drawings up to the final massive size without losing any of the quality in the lines or the colour.

Once I had all of the exterior and interior walls finalised I got the scalpel and glue out to create a scale model, which allowed me to get a feel for the museum in 3D form and gave the client the opportunity to check we hadn't missed anything before sending the files to the manufacturing team.

The great Inflate!! Yay - it exists, and it looks awesome, I'm still trying to get a video of the museum inflating - but here are a few sneak peeks - check back soon to see it in all it's enormous glory!!