On May 27th I caught the boat to Greenwich Book Festival where I read ALPHONSE, THAT IS NOT OK TO DO! to the excellent people pictured (and excellent others) and then let them loose on the googly eyes and double-sided tape, leading to Most Excellent Fantastic monster finger puppets. There was much innovation in the areas of spots and extending grab-hands. Thanks to Andrew Porter Photography for the brilliant photos, to Greenwich Book Festival and everyone who came.
All photos © Andrew Porter 2017
Tag: London
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:
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…
ALPHONSE launch: biscuitmania at Gosh!
My second picturebook, ALPHONSE, THAT IS NOT OK TO DO! was launched on April 20th at London’s most splendid comics shop, Gosh! by a crowd of very lovely people and an unreasonably delicious new instalment in the Emily-Wilkinson-bakes-my-books saga (see here, and here, and here, and here for Emily’s page).
I arrived in a tiswas, thinking, “AIEE, what if no one comes?” followed by, “AIEE, what if someone comes?” and, “AIEE, biscuits stuck in traffic! What if people come mainly for biscuits and get justifiably enraged?” But those nice comics folks calmed me right down with tea, and got me started on signing The Heap.
I was overwhelmed by so many friends and relations coming along to celebrate Alphonse, and that was before the biscuits and Natalie and Alphonse arrived to make sense of it all – sitting down centrepieceishly in the space between all the books and drawing their giant pig (which was eaten and magically regenerated two times! And then decisively consumed in our third attempt).
Thanks so much to everyone who came, and to Gosh! and Walker Books. If you couldn’t make it but would like a signed book, I think Gosh! may still have part of The Heap.
Dulwich Books has a system
To celebrate the release of The Girl with the Parrot on her Head in paperback, the lovely Dulwich books have put Isabel and her system, and the WOLF in their window:
I am extremely grateful, again, for the amazing scalpel work performed on this display by the design team at Walker Books. Hmm, I wonder if I will get to design any monster windows when ALPHONSE, THAT IS NOT OK TO DO! is loosed in March…
Prints for Material
Material of Shoreditch, London, recently began selling a range of my little screenprints. The prints feature monkeys and blackbirds – some based on the same drawings as previous monkeys and some I was trying as prints for the first time.
The monkeys come in various colour combination
s and think about various things.