Monster puppets and adventure drawing

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:
Motorbike drawingSquirrel and treehouse worlds joined by ladders, and a majestic giant bee
Children drawing an adventure
featuring cup-holder, chips-holder, sound system, umbrella and MANY SHOES.Giant bee
Next it was time for monster puppets: here are just a few of one family’s horde.Some of the puppets made by one family
We started with corrugated paper finger puppets, with all manner of multiple heads, horns, tongues, wings and other appendages.
Two-headed monster puppet Monster puppets on plinthsMany puppets
There was even one with eyes on accordion stalks.
Monster with eyes on 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.
Longest monster puppet
And this one has a wonderful expression.
Dragon puppetThere 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!Monster puppet made of boxSome people even got around to building theatres – I bet some ace plays were staged once they got them home…
Theatre

Advent jam the third!

Ho-HO! It is that time of year again when Becky Palmer and I start a day late on our gloopy pot of Christmas comic jam and continue posting a panel a day (sometimes with gaps and gluts) throughout advent. If your toast needs MORE jam, you can catch up with our 2013 and 2014 comics here or on Becky’s blog, and ahem well I’m to go first:
1st December panel by Daisy2nd December by BeckyBy Daisy4th December5_72
By Becky
By DaisyBy BeckyBy DaisyBy BeckyBy Daisy
By Becky
By DaisyBy BeckyBy DaisyBy BeckyBy DaisyBy BeckyBy DaisyBy BeckyBy DaisyBy BeckyBy DaisyBy Becky

Bunnies with lipstick, antiques

Yesterday at House of Illustration, in a workshop I’d been scheming about for months, a group of children created a whole new system based on Isabel’s cardboard boxes in The Girl with the Parrot on her Head. I’ll post more about this workshop but just wanted to share the giant mural right away, as it made me so happy to see the system so brilliantly reinvented (to enlarge, click on the image above and click again when it reappears).System composite

 

Velopresso beasts on bikes

Last year my friends at Velopresso asked me to draw them a horde of cycling animals, people and beasties-in-general to decorate one of their beautiful pedal-powered coffee trikes. Trike 001 was recently launched during Bespoked in Bristol, where Velopresso also won the Constructors’ Challenge prize – HURROO!

Velopresso 001
Photo © Velopresso 2015

I haven’t seen it with my own eyes YET but I love the photos (more on Velopresso’s facebook page). The designer did a brilliant job arranging the crowd.

Bicycles are quite hard things to draw – not so bad as horses maybe (so many knees! On backwards!), but getting all the legs on the pedals? When the legs may be very short and belonging to pigs or sheep? Ach! I was afraid Velopresso, who clearly have an exemplary understanding of bicycle construction, would want drawings in better working order than I’d be able to muster – but luckily they were very supportive of skrunkiness and wrongness. I don’t know that my bike-drawing skills are much improved, but my repertoire of cyclists has certainly grown. Bring on the unicycling horse.

I must have drawn over 100 beasties or groups as I submitted about 70; I keep losing count, but I think there are 31 drawings on the final trike. Here are a few constituent beasts:
Tandem bearsVelopresso

ChickensLibrary
If you’d like to meet a Velopresso in real life it’s probably best to follow them on Twitter or Facebook.