Animation & Art Workshops, Children's Picture Books and Illustration
This was such a fun and interesting project to work on: I was commissioned by Carlton Books to draw 20 illustrations for a popular science book, which is being published today, 12th September. I haven’t been able to put them up until now for copyright etc reasons, but here they are now. The authors were great to work with, specially the amazing Hayley Birch – you can check out her Sounds of Science blog here.
Here’s this year’s corker from the very talented, imaginative and crazy kids of Shambala!
Well done everyone, look forward to seeing you all again next year!
Well, I don’t know what you’re up to this summer, but I’m going to be delivering 42 half day workshops in Birmingham’s libraries, all based around the theme of “The Creepy Library of Birmingham”. It’s going to be an amazing project, and I’m very excited about it.. it’s linked to this year’s national Summer Reading Challenge, called “Creepy House”. I’ll put dates and venues up soon, and if you’re in Brum this summer (and not Brazil or Mongolia like some of you…) then come and have a go at animating some very creepy characters!
And here’s the final animation!
This was lots of fun! I organised a Doodle Wall complete with live acoustic guitar, Small World TV (some animations I’ve facilitated on my old Emac…) and CAKE to make a Doodle Lounge – it was part of Hamilton House Open day last Sunday. Everyone really seemed to enjoy it, and it kind of (unsurprisingly really) turned into the kids’ area for the afternoon! here are some photos of the event including some pics of some specially nice doodles:
I was lucky to be invited to work as the illustrator for a new storytelling and literacy project here in Bristol recently. It’s called The Inventive Inventors’ Inventory and is currently based at the new J3 library in Easton. For the first session (and the opening of the brand-new library) about 12 children came along and in a session jointly led by Rebecca Tantony and Robin Etherington, wrote the story of an evil princess and her sidekick who plan to take over Candy Land by poisoning all the children. It’s a gruesome premise for a children’s story, but totally in line with the Grimm brothers and Hans Christian Anderson! I frantically sketched characters and story ideas and below you can see the finished illustrations. The text and illustrations will be printed as a book and distributed to all the children who participated . NB there is a cliff-hanger ending here – during the session the children got to this point in the story and then each went off and wrote their own endings, which all be published in the book, each with their own illustration.
I’ve just finished the artwork for a poster for Coexist, who run Hamilton House where I’ve got my studio. There’s all sorts of artists, filmmakers, writers, social entrepreneurs, charities and craftspeople here, and the Coexist project itself is brilliant. You can find out lots more about it here www.hamiltonhouse.org. The poster is for Hamilton House Open Day on 25th May.
I’m really excited to be part of a new creative learning initiative in Bristol. It’s linked to the “Ministry of Stories” in London, and is part of a global model (Sydney, Brooklyn NY and San Francisco) for inspiring kids to write and tell stories. Working with professional storytellers and artists, children get to create their own stories, then see the final product bound and fully illustrated by a professional illustrator (which is me in this instance). There was some very hectic sketching during the first session at the new J3 library in Easton, and now I’ve got to polish them up to make some really nice illos to go with the brilliant story the kids wrote between them called”Big Hands in Little Candyland”. Here are the sketches, and to find out more about the project go to bristolstorylab.com, and well… can Bobbinman save the day???
Hello Bath-type-super-talented-animation-peeps! It’s quite hard to make an animation in a day, but you did it. As (wise) Nancy said “It’s not exactly Agatha Christie, is it?”, but then she didn’t do it all from scratch in a day!! Well done everyone, and thanks for being a lovely bunch of people to work with!
Here’s the edited version with sound and some effects.. all done in iMovie on a Mac (you could use Windows MovieMaker if you’re working on a PC) with free backing track downloaded from partnersinrhyme.com.
I was really pleased to be offered the chance to go and work with Knowle West Media Centre during August on their Summer Programme, a really exciting project which offered animation, graffiti, photography, digital music-making, podcasting and djing to local kids who otherwise wouldn’t have access to such high-quality creative digital media activities, they were all great to work with and some of the work they produced was fantastic.
We were doing mainly 3D stop-motion in my workshops, below is a gallery featuring some of the great characters they designed, made and animated. (Films will be posted as soon as I get them from KWMC!)
The Mean Brain
There have been a few good things going on in Small World over the summer, and this was one of them, “The Mean Brain” an animation by Bene (age 8 now, but 7 when he made it) which he made with me over a few weeks. It’s all his concept, story and making. He then went on to work with musician Algy Behrens and with Algy’s help has added a brilliant soundtrack. Here’s the final finished fantastic film:
smallworldanimations.com