Pollock's Toy Museum

Last Saturday we went on a impromptu trip to London looking around the old Crystal Palace area, but after our business was taken care of there, we were free to gallivant around the big city at our leisure (fighting the tiredness that dogged us since 6 o'clock in that morning!)

Firsty, after seeing the BBC report, I thought it was rather a co-inky dink that the LolCat exhibition was on whilst we were in London, so I thought it was only polite to take a quick gander at it! It was located in a quaint little picture frame shop called The Framers Gallery, and it was pretty busy when we arrived!
I like the idea of little exhibitions like this, bringing people together over a particular subject and looking at some awesome art/graphic design/sculpture at the same time! Maybe this could become a thing all over the country?
Also, the art work was for sale, and any money raised from the show goes towards Battersea Dogs and Cats Home, so its all for a good cause! I recommend a wee peek in if you're in London anytime in the next two weeks (the exhibition is running till the 15th February). For more information, you can visit this page RIGHT HERE.

After our catty excursion, we moseyed on over to Pollock's Toy Museum (just a 5 minute walk away) to check out all the awesome old-fashioned toys they had there! It was £6 entry for an adult, you're given a map and left to explore the building, which is an 18th and 19th century house merged into one. There are winding staircases covered in toys, pictures, board games, and each room (complete with lovely creaky floor boards) is themed on particular toys, such as toy theatres, dolls, or optical gadgets. I got quite a few photos in there, so lets see them!

There were ten million more toys in there than I'm showing, but oooh those glass cases made getting a good shot tricky (for a non-photographer like me, anyway...) But yes, the museum is located on Scala Street (you can't miss it when you see it), you can find a map and more info on the museum's website - Pollock's Toy Museum Website. So yeah...lets go!

Children's Picturebooks

Father Christmas delivered some very lovely presents to me over Crimbo time, and one of those presents was 'Children's Picturebooks' by Martin Salisbury and Morag Styles.

Its been a very interesting read, covering a number of topics, such as the history of children's books - naming a number of influential people from each decade, and discussing the development of printing methods used to produce children's books during those times.
The authors also analyse the different illustrative styles of picturebooks, difficult subjects tackled by picturebooks and how children interpret picturebooks; the book is also peppered with various case studies from professionals and students giving insights into specific aspects of creating your own picturebook.

Other subjects covered are printing methods used by picturebook makers today (including case studies from illustrators who print their own books) and a thorough explanation on the children's publishing industry (including information on how illustrators approach them with their work).

I really like the design/layout of this book, each section is laid out simply, using the space of the page to great effect. And I especially like the mix of typography used for the headings of each section.

Visual examples of illustrator's work give a burst of colour to every page and encourage the reader to look up further examples of that person's work. (I was Google searching quite a lot whilst reading!)

'Children's Picturebooks' was designed by Studio Ten and a Half and published by Lawrence King Publishing. This is a book I know I will come back to often for inspiration and information - naming a hoard of illustrators I will certainly be Google searching more of in the future!

I also fully recommend another one of their books How to Create a Portfolio and Get Hired, its pretty informative about all aspects of portfolio design and how to make it appeal to specific areas of the graphic design industry.

Sneak Peek

I have been working on a few illustrations/book jacket over the past couple of weeks to enter into an illustration competition (the deadline was yetserday) and I thought I'd give a couple of very sneaky peeks of what I've been working on here! So here ya gooooooo!!
(Apologies for the dodgy camera skills!)

I quite enjoyed working on these pieces - I tried to push myself to tweak my style a little bit, and experiment with a mix of watercolour and pencil. I unfortunately didn't leave myself a lot of time to work on the illustrations before the deadline, so I feel I wasn't able to experiment with colour and mediums as much as I'd have liked, but c'est la vie! Hopefully next time!

Competition

Here are a couple of shots of what I'm making for an illustration competition - the deadline is looming quite near! Eeeep!

Reading List 2012 (Part 2)!

And here are the last lot of drawings I did as part of my Reading List project!

Reading List 2012

For the start of the New Year I decided to set myself a little project, in which I created a small illustration for each book title I read in 2012.
I limited myself to using 4 types of fine liner and drawing them all free stylee (no pencil marks to trace over for me, no siree!), which I found to be quite interesting!
There are 13 scribbles in total, so here is the first half of my reading list from 2012: