Last Saturday I had an amazing afternoon at House of Illustration, running a family workshop based on ALPHONSE, THAT IS NOT OK TO DO! After a quick reading, we did some giant collaborative adventure drawing – just like Natalie and Alphonse do in the book. Highlights included Natalie and Alphonse on their five-wheeled motorbike:
Squirrel and treehouse worlds joined by ladders, and a majestic giant bee
featuring cup-holder, chips-holder, sound system, umbrella and MANY SHOES.
Next it was time for monster puppets: here are just a few of one family’s horde.
We started with corrugated paper finger puppets, with all manner of multiple heads, horns, tongues, wings and other appendages.
There was even one with eyes on accordion stalks.
It’s interesting running events at House of Illustration because the great facilities and unusually long workshops mean you can plan more extended, open-ended activities, so I’d prepared various kinds of puppets to experiment with. There were accordion-beasts inspired by Chinese dragon stick-puppets, of which this was definitely the longest.
And this one has a wonderful expression.
There were also puppets with moving wings, mouths, arms or eyebrows made using split pins, but I seem to have no pictures of those. At least I can show you this brilliant new thing: a box-mouth monster with a monster baby inside, operated by hidden lolly stick!
Some people even got around to building theatres – I bet some ace plays were staged once they got them home…
I should write a proper blogpost about this really – it has been a fairly epic process, during which I became very attached to this friendliest and reddest of pigs. However, I am printing monsters at a million miles an hour for my fourth book so I will just have to do it inaminute. Meanwhile, here is a post about how it was not the most sensible thing to screenprint and here are some places to get your very own Hilda in English or French.
