WonderTree Spotlight: A Young Artist’s Story Through Art

I'm Alana (she/he/they)! I'm a 16-year-old homeschool student with a passion for dinosaurs and creativity. I’m a multi-medium artist who loves digital design, drawing, and paper crafting. I also mentor younger kids at a local maker space. I'm autistic, dyslexic, and have slow processing speed, which means I experience and understand the world in a unique way. Dinosaurs have been a special interest of mine since I was around 10 or 11 years old, and I like using my art and writing to share my passion for dinosaurs with others.

My Experience With Play

 Written by Alana

When I was 11, I became very interested in dinosaurs. I had liked dinosaurs my entire life, but at age 11 I became more fascinated by them than ever before. I'll set the scene for you: it's 2020 (The year no one likes talking about. I know, but it's important to this story). There are only three people in my household, and I am the only child, so suddenly, my social circle became very small. My interest in dinosaurs grew throughout lockdown. I'm not entirely sure why; maybe it was all the time to myself. Maybe it was because before my social life ended, I had played dinosaurs with my friends. Whatever the reason, dinosaurs became one of my main autistic special interests, and they have remained that way to this day. 

Over the past four years, I have collected a wide variety of dinosaur knowledge, dinosaur art, dinosaur books and dinosaur toys. Oh, the toys. The variety I managed to acquire in a short time was astonishing. I have expensive Mattel toys perfectly modelled after the creatures in the popular Jurassic franchise (which I loved at the time and still do today). I have cheap dollar-store dinosaurs, which I painted to look more exciting. I have plastic figurines that look so paleontologically accurate you could display them in a museum. I have second-hand toys that look so ridiculous you can't even tell what species they are supposed to resemble.

I acquired stuffed toys as well. My personal favourite is a large velociraptor, around three feet in length. It is covered in brown scaly fabric. It possesses perfectly shaped claws and a mouth full of rubber teeth. Its plastic eyes are yellow with round pupils that always seem to be watching you. 

My large raptor saw a lot of usage in imagination games. My friends and I used to pretend to be dinosaurs. We would run around the living room or the trampoline, carrying ourselves in odd ways and making strange bird and reptile noises. My stuffed raptor would often play the role of our baby. We treated it more like an object that needed to be protected than an actual character in the story. 

I used my other dinosaur toys in a different manner. The games I played with them were much less physical. I would sit on my carpet-covered floor, or on very rare occasions outside on the lawn, and move my dinosaurs along the ground as I acted out scenes with them. The scenes I acted out with my toys varied in length and complexity. Sometimes, it was a brief ten-minute game where two dinosaurs got into a territorial dispute. Other times my games lasted multiple hours and the story was full of twists and turns with a dramatic climax at the end. Sometimes, I would convince a friend or a family member to play dinosaurs with me, and other times it was just me entertaining myself. 

The type of scene I acted out would also vary. Sometimes, I would act out scenes so realistic they could be in a nature documentary. Other times I created dramatic fight scenes with over-the-top choreography. If I was feeling particularly creative, I would create completely unrealistic scenarios. I’ll list a few of my favourites. A carnotaurus is facing unemployment because his arms are too short for most jobs. A small group of therapod children are not allowed to be friends because of intergenerational racism. A group of velociraptors, through not exactly legal means, acquire an old bus and decide to renovate it. A young allosaurus spent too much time around pterosaurs, and now they believe they can fly (spoiler alert: they can't). 

I don't play with my dinosaurs much anymore, but I still like to get them out and show them to people. Some family members and friends say they can see the joy my dinosaurs bring me. They say that they can see the excitement in my expression as I present a plastic baryonyx I've shown them twenty times before. 

I know that some people think that an AFAB (assigned female at birth) person in their teens should not even own, let alone play with, toys anymore. But I don't care. My dinosaurs make me happy, and that's all that matters to me. 

Press play to watch Alana's stop motion creation below!