Oliver's Heroes

I continue to find my days cheered by the spontaneity and imagination of children's drawing. This is Oliver's sketch of himself as a King, clearly conducting a lurid battle. I particularly fell for the horse, entering right stage ...

Going on a Bear Hunt

We're going on a BEAR hunt ... ... we're going to catch a BIG one ... ... I'm NOT scared ... ... Oh NO ... ...
An enormous pool of slirpy, sloppy, soggy water ...







A twisty, tangly jungle ...









Ah, the bear ...

















Phew! And home ...








A two hour workshop with toddlers to turn Heathfield Children's Centre into a stage set for a Comic Relief Bear Hunt!

Artists Boxes

I've been playing with the idea of an 'Artists' Box', as a development to an 'Artists' Book'. I'd like to to develop boxes which reflect each of the birds I fell in love with as I travelled down South America. Today, in checking out what other people have been up to in this area, I came across John Dilnot, who is similarly intrigued by both birds and boxes. I like the combination of paper illustrations and real trees ...

The Infinite Possibilities of Polyblock Printing

When my teenagers played briefly with polyblock printing a couple of weeks ago I was really impressed with the way Lucy turned a very primitive, if effective method into something really beautiful, simply by layering prints in different colours over the top of each other ...

Jungle Collograph

This is the result of one of those lucky moments, hopefully familiar to us all, where in the excitement of a reasonably new discovery, we embark on a massively ambitious project. Dream about it day an night, injure our necks from leaning over it 12 hours a day, and suddenly realise when we've nearly finished that this was really rather stupid because it will probably all go horribly wrong. Well it didn't go horribly wrong, thank goodness. Inspired by the dense foliage of Ecuadorian Jungle, this is a work in progress, with a happy start!

Golden Swans and Blind Vultures

Last week's Holiday Activities at Orleans House saw my 9-14s group creating illustrations of Indian Folktales inspired by the enormous, eccentric works of Piyali Ghosh, which form part of the Journeys exhibition.

In a day which used printmaking, collage, painting and drawing, as well as getting to know their folktale of choice, we had a grand old time! Here are illustrations of the Golden Swan and the Blind Vulture.