Come and join me at the Pavilions Theatre Teignmouth on July 30 to make your very own “How to Train Your Dragon” 2D stop motion animation.
Make and animate your own Toothless and Hiccup, or invent your own dragon and flying Viking riding across the sea and through the sky! See all the details below – call the Pavilions box office on 01626 249049 or go online here to book
Dress for (a little bit of) mess, aprons provided.
Wednesday 30 July 10.30am-12.30pm
£15.00 per child
Ages 7-12
12 places available
Parents must stay for session with children under 8
Hello! I’ll be running a children’s craft workshop at the Pavilions Theatre in Teignmouth next Wednesday 28th May!
We’ll be making a folding diorama of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves House – it’s a simple make, all you have to do is draw and colour your house and the characters 🙂
Go to the Pavilions Website for details and to book, or call them on 01626 249049.
I’ve joined Orange Beak Studio’s Picture Book Club 🙂 There are different options that you can subscribe to (it’s a Patreon-thing) so for about £5 per month I get these great prompts for making illustrations. Last month we were given lots of different types of shoes and asked to develop characters from their footwear.
There used to be a nutty kids’ animation series called “Shoe People” It made me think of that… There’s a clip at the end of this post.
In the meantime, here are the characters I created:
Scouring the backwaters of the ITV Hub for a period drama to watch (!!), I came across Fireball XL5 – all the complete series. An early 1960s Gerry Anderson “Supermarionation” (yes, that’s where Super Mario gets his name from) children’s series, I absolutely LOVED this when I was a little kid, and would always watch it, so long as our telly was working – not always a given in the middle of Dartmoor in the 1960s.
Here’s the first episode of Fireball XL5.
I remember it mainly for being the first thing I ever had a dream about, so I knew it had caught my five year-old imagination. However, it seems to have been more influential than I realised, as watching it again today, I see how much Shimmer and Disappear, the music video I animated in 2018, was inspired by it.!
You can find all the episodes of Fireball XL5 here on ITV (in the UK). It’s definitely worth a look. Even though some of the attitudes and views are pretty dated, the craft and the visual storytelling are extraordinary. Not so sure my effort quite lives up to it…! 🙂
In fact, my animation has been described as having more of a “Button Moon vibe”!
To give you an idea, here’s a still from Button Moon:
Coincidentally, all the series of Button Moon are also on the ITV Hub, so that’s where to head if this post has sparked your interest in British Sci-Fi Puppetry TV Shows For Kids!
This is an amazing puppetry project, featuring life-size cardboard puppets of animals that will be walked across the world from the Congo to Trondheim in the Arctic Circle. Animals all over the planet are facing life-threatening dangers from global warming – this project aims to highlight the peril that they, and we (also animals), are all facing.
On the website you can sign up for the Newsletter to receive updates on the journey taking place from now till end August, and there are great education resources, including downloadable Puppet-making workshops! 🙂 I’ve uploaded the Pangolin here – it’s a bit fiddly, but worth the effort, and the materials (ie cardboard!) are very accessible.
I am smally olives, the famous pop star. All my fans threw their hot pants at me when I went on Top of the mops to sing my new single, ‘jumping tuba’. which reached number 5 in the charts. Anyway, I told paul macartney, ‘Compared to me, paul macartney, you sound like banana skin!’ Then paul macartney said ‘Oooh! Get you Lavinia! Wait till I tell cilla black!’
Some beautiful, magical artworks were made at the “Fantastical Forests” workshop I ran at half term. So good to see all the children so busy and engaged, imagining and creating their own fantastical forest worlds.
Spring is taking a while to get to Devon this year, so to brighten up the day we made some colourful, sensory spring pictures with bees and spring flowers.
I’ve been working for a few months with a small group of adults with very different abilities at a local care home. They really enjoyed creating their pictures using shiny paper, brightly coloured card and soft felts.
smallworldanimations.com 