I was given the high pressure job this afternoon of drawing a dinosaur to entertain one of my young cousins. Children can be such harsh critics! However, in this case, it turned out to be quite easy. The trick was not to worry about getting it looking ‘right’ but to weave the process of drawing with narrative and interaction. We had a plastic toy to work from so I asked lots of questions. How many eyes does the dinosaur have? How many legs? How many toes? Oh, look, I’ve run out of paper… do you mind if I make the tail curly?

Although the exercise isn’t really about carefully putting on paper what you see, it is about process rather than end result. And, in that, it is really quite a grown up way to draw even if, without the main aim of entertaining a child, I would be asking different questions to guide me through the journey from blank page to drawing.