News – Page 9 – Daisy Hirst

Exhibition with a parrot on its head

Yesterday I put up an exhibition at Pickled Pepper, Crouch End’s specialist children’s bookshop. I framed eleven of the screenprints I made for my first picturebook, The Girl with the Parrot on her Head, and they’ll stay on display all summer, until August 31st. It’s great to have a chance to show the artwork, especially in Pickled Pepper’s lovely event space.

The first week of the exhibition coincides with the Crouch End Festival (5th-14th June) so there are lots of other things to see and do if you visit then, including a Girl with the Parrot on her Head reading and craft workshop on Saturday 13th June.

The pictures are hand-made screenprints, and prints from the same editions (so almost the same as the framed/published prints) will be for sale. If you’d like to read more about the illustrations, I wrote a guest blog for Walker about making the book.

An update: now there’s a Girl with the Parrot on her Head window too!

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).

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:

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

More monkeys

I can add the rest of these monkey screenprints now as the AMAZING new human they were made for is born and in possession of her monkeys (and an oddish long-nose bear which really taxed my sewing skills).
In other news, I have an EVENTS PAGE and some events (more to add shortly). Hope to see you soon!

Monkeys in the gap

I am having a gap. In a gap it is best to do THINGS. THINGS can include working on stories that nobody wants yet (maybe they are too weird or long, maybe nobody has seen them), and drawing, and seeing how monkeys work as screenprints.

By which means I learn the shocking truth that better-drawn monkeys make better screenprints. So the one with the umbrella stays insipid.