Janet and Anne Grahame Johnstone

Today I wanted to showcase two of my favourite illustrators of all time!  My Grandmother used to have one of their books and often I would disappear upstairs whenever I went to her house so that I could go and look at it.  It was a book of nursery rhymes and absolutely beautifully illustrated. That book is now mine! :) (my grandmother gave it to me after graduating)

Janet and Anne Grahame Johnstone were twin sisters.  I think it is amazing how they both worked on the illustrations together, passing them back and forth until they were both pleased with the outcome.  I could never imagine working with someone else on a picture and being satisfied with it...

I always loved those two little fairies down in the corner here.

Anyhow, I am lucky that I now have a few more of their books. So I have lots more of their illustrations to look at! And I often do get them out and look at them.  I just love the detail and stylization in the pictures.  I find them very inspiring.

This was my favourite picture in the Nursery Rhyme book.

Nursery Rhymes again. Love the colours!

Couldn't get all this picture in the scanner. Hansel and Gretel

The Water Babies

Peter Pan

 Bye! xox

Happy Christmas!

Here's a little nativity scene for you.

I'm feeling very excited about Christmas right now!  It can't come soon enough!  I have been doing lots of Christmassy things and watching lots of Christmassy films.  This year Henry and I wrote a list of films that we were going to watch in December and we managed to watch almost all of them!  On our list was:  Lost in Translation (I wouldn't actually class this as a Christmassy film but Henry seemed to think it was) The Hogfather (I love love love the Hogfather!) Love Actually, How the Grinch stole Christmas and more that I can't rememeber.  We didn't get round to watching the tailor of Gloucester or the Snowman. But I will definitely try to watch the Snowman sometime tomorrow because its one of my very favourite christmas films and it's kind of a tradition to watch it every year.

I decorated this gingerbread house:

Can't wait to bite into that chocolate button roof!

And I've done lots of festive shopping. While I was shopping in Cambridge the other day I spotted this wonderful packaging for a Paddington Bear cup and plate.  It was based on the old animations of Paddington Bear which were done using stop motion and characters drawn on cut out paper.  People often say to me that my 3d illustration work reminds them of the old Paddington Bear animations.

In case you've never seen any of the old Padidngton Bear animations here are some stills from it.  I absolutely love it, (it's so charming!) and want to get the dvd at some point.

Also whilst out in town the other day I came across this cute little book called 'Tat the Cat, A Winters Tale,'  by Bill and Audrey Titcombe in a charity shop.  I snapped it up right away.  It was only 30 p!  I love the characterful illustrations.  Just look at the eyelashes on those duckies!

So now I am sitting by the tree and writing this and feeling too excited to go to bed.  It's not even Christmas Eve yet!  I don't know whats come over me.  I feel like a little kid.  Also there's no Henry here right now to tell me that it's late and time to go to bed. He's gone back home to see his family for a few days.  I miss him.

Well I should probably wrap this up now. If I don't post again before the 25th, have a wonderful sparkling GLITTERING CHRISTMAS! 

Love and Snowflakes

A few things...

Time has been flying by so fast!  I can't believe that I am almost at the end of my masters.  I have been working working working these past few weeks trying to get my final project done.  it't still not finished but I feel like I'm almost there!  Or almost almost there at least.  I've been doing more 3d stuff again. And it takes so loooong.  But it's satisfying when you get a good picture at the end of it.

This picture (below) is not part of my final project, it's just a random experimental image I did of Victoria Stitch over the summer, stirring up  witchy potion.  I know the hands need to look more believable but I did do the whole thing very quickly.

On Monday I went to London to meet some friends.  We went to Pizza Hut and the (huge and gigantic) MnM store.  Seriously I have never seen so many bits of merchandise with the MnM logo on them before!  It was crazy!  And they had all these tubes against the walls with 22 different colours of MnM's in them.  They looked yum.  But anyway, apart from Pizza Hut and the MnM store, I also went to Foyles book shop to check out the children's section.  I like to visit Foyles if I can when I am in London because they always have such an amazing range of children's books.  And they didn't disappoint this time!

I discovered these lovely books:

Clara Button and the Magical Hat Day

 The High Street

And a load of Rob Ryan books. (I had not been acquainted with Rob Ryan's work before Monday but I think his cut out illustrations are beautiful)

I didn't actually buy any of them for myself but I might put a couple on my christmas list. Inspiring!

Other things that have happened lately:

1. My Grandparents dog had puppies! They are so cute!  They are a lot bigger than this now (this is them at one day old) and are all bouncing around and nibbling each others ears and playing.  I will post more pictures of them soon.

2. Ok so I know this is ages ago now but here's a picture of Henry and I on Halloween.  I basically recycled my grad ball outfit and wore a witches hat.  We had dinner at my friend Bruno's house and it was really nice.  There were lots of pumpkins.  In fact this was actually the same night that the puppies were born!

Other than that my life has mainly been work work work!  But that's ok.  I will post pictures of my new project soon!

Poppy Picklesticks

I've recently been churning my way through books written by Philip Ridley.  Kasper in the Glitter, Vinegar Street and Scribbleboy are the three most recent.  I just think that he is a fantastic, imaginative and unusual writer and wanted to share this picture with you from one of his books.  It's drawn by Stephen Lee and is of a character called Poppy Picklesticks from the book 'Vinegar Street.'  I love her gothic style!

However, Kasper in the Glitter is my favourite out of the three books.  It works as a kind of urban fairytale and is full of eccentric characters and quirky imagery.  There is Kasper Whiskey who always wears yellow and makes a lot of banoffee pies.  He makes them for his mother, Pumpkin, who always calls him 'honey' and only cares about being sparkling.  They live alone, far away from the city.  But the arrival of a boy called Heartthrob Mink changes Kasper's life forever, taking him to The City and the enticing world of King Streetwise...

Princess Terribelle and the Wellington Boot

I got this in the post yesterday, found it on amazon for 1p or something.  I used to read it a lot when I was little but don't know where my copy of the book went.

It made me so happy to read it again!  (It used to be one of my favourite books.)

The story is about Princess Terribelle who was mostly very good but sometimes she was bad.  She lives in a Palace and sleeps every night on fourteen mattresses and five pillows.  One day she gets taken for tea with the Duchess and her daughter Arabel. 

Arabel has lots of dolls and Princess Terribelle becomes obsessed with this tiny pair wellington boots that she finds among the doll clothes.  She loves them so much that she slips one of them into her pocket and takes it home.

But Princess Terribelle feels a little bit guilty and she also discovers that it's not so much fun playing with just one boot.

 

  

Anyway then one day Arabel come round for tea and Princess Terribelle hides the little wellington boot, hoping that Arabel has forgotten about it.  At the end of the evening Arabel slips a package to Terribelle and inside it is the other boot.  Then they become best of friends and all is happy and wonderful and Terribelle never bosses Arabel about again. The end.

I think I used to love it so much because I was also obsessed with tiny things.  I think I liked the way Princess Terribelle imagined that the boots were fairy boots. I remember writing tiny letters and putting them in the garden for the fairies when I was small. And totally believing a fairy would find them!

Right now my life is tartan royalty, glitterlashes, drinking raspberry tea, wearing tiaras round the house, drawing chandeliers and red nail varnish.

I'm working on the pages of my kids book at the moment and it's HARD. Hard to wake up with motivation for it every day, especially as we had a crit the other day and the tutors just pulled it all apart.  But just gotta keep going! I might post some images from it soon though. I'd post one now but it's all pink and would clash with this red-orientated post.  

Til next time! x