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

ALPHONSE at WayWord festival

I’ve just come back from having the MOST FUN being Festival Illustrator at Chester’s WayWord children’s festival for the second year in a row. This was my first chance to read ALPHONSE, THAT IS NOT OK TO DO! with children (even though it’s not published until 5th March), and to try some monster-themed drawing and making.

Photo © Mark Carline for Chester Performs
Photo © Mark Carline for Chester Performs

At one event we read ALPHONSE and The Girl with the Parrot on her Head and played drawing games together, just as Natalie and Alphonse draw together in the book.

Photo © Mark Carline for Chester Performs
Photo © Mark Carline for Chester Performs

I also ran a monster finger puppet workshop.

©
Photo © Mark Carline for Chester Performs
Puppets
Photo © Mark Carline for Chester Performs

And another (with a lot of help from Nicola and Helen of Chester Performs) on stencilling onto canvas bags. It would have been hard to do screen printing (which is how I usually make my illustrations) in this workshop, unless everyone had printed the same image, but the freezer paper stencils were quite magic, and the resulting bags were so cool!

nvnb
Photo © Mark Carline for Chester Performs

Ice creamCat by MeganAlphonse with trunk

I spent the rest of my time drawing the festival – which was embarrassing as I’m heinously out of practice with observational drawing, but good for me. Here’s one of my drawings – visit WayWord for more (and next year, maybe visit the actual WayWord as it is ALL THE FUN).

Family workshops at House of Illustration

House of Illustration have just published a guest blogpost I wrote for them about a workshop I ran there in May, based on The Girl with the Parrot on her Head. AND, I’ve been invited back to run another family workshop on 5th August with Becky Palmer, this time linked to their summer exhibition of Ladybird books, Ladybird by Design.
Ladybird BookWe’ll be asking: what if ladybirds had Ladybird books of their own? What would they be about? Heraldry? Leaves? Aphids? Microcomputers? How small would they be? Book online now and come and help us find out.

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

 

Resident Illustrator with a parrot on her head

I spent most of last week in Chester Town Hall, as resident Illustrator at WayWord festival – an eight-day-long parade of half-term excellentness, organised by the lovely people at Chester Performs. My favourite thing was the cardboard den workshop (inspired by The Girl with the Parrot on her Head):

Photo © Mark Carline for Chester Performs
Photo © Mark Carline for Chester Performs
Photo © Mark Carline for Chester Performs
Photo © Mark Carline for Chester Performs

Mark Carline took lots of other brilliant photos too. This one’s mine and not so good but I did particularly like the robot-rabbit den:
Robot-rabbit
I also did a reading and talked about how I came to make picturebooks:

Photo © Mark Carline for Chester Performs
Photo © Mark Carline for Chester Performs

And there were two more workshops in which we made animals to go on our heads. The animals were AMAZING. Here’s The Boy with the Jaguar on his Head and The Girls with the Tasmanian Devil and the Pink-faced Polar Bear on their Heads:
Boy with the jaguar on his head Tas

On my final day at the festival Kate Pankhurst and I made two completely new books in a picturebook jam. One of them started like this (me then Kate):
Jam pig 1
Jam pig 2
As resident Illustrator I also got to loiter around drawing all the other goings on – from an amazing range of author events to giant chess and never-ending free crafts. Some of my festival drawings are on the WayWord site but here’s the queue for Shlomo, followed by Alex Wiltshire talking about minecraft:
Queue

Alex WiltshireI felt very lucky to be there and very well looked-after – Chester Performs put on a grand show (and are incredibly good at collecting cardboard).