Hilary Talbot’s passing interests and activities
Posted in books, design, illustration on Feb 13th, 2006
Lucy Tartan’s review of Margaret Atwood’s novel Alias Grace over at Sorrow at Sills Bend this morning prompted me to go hunting for my sketch of all the quilt square patterns that were used as chapter illustrations. I liked how the motif worked in with the story and themes of each chapter much better than [...]
I remembered yesterday that the tip about storing marionettes by twirling them so the strings twist up together (in the comments under my last post) came from a lovely book called The Magic of Marionettes by Anne Masson. It was given to one of my kids, but I got a great deal out of it [...]
Rebound Designs takes old books and turns them into bags. I’m not a handbag user, so in a practical sense they are lost on me, but they are really cool. I took a spin past a couple of the op shops the other day, and came home with a few books to experiment with. Maybe [...]
Posted in craft, make, portfolio, sculpture on May 29th, 2005
The theme for Month of Softies this month was ‘May Flowers’. My first thought was of daffodils, as I remember loving how they came up all over the place in lawns in the chilly spring in York and Cambridge; and I thought I might try to make Talitha, the brave daffodil princess from the book [...]
Posted in books, illustration on May 4th, 2005
The following illustration is by Tibor Gergely from the Little Golden Book ‘Houses’ by Elsa Jane Werner. I’m posting it as a comparison to the one by Richard Scarry in another Little Golden Book, ‘Cars and Trucks’, over at Wee Wonderfuls. There is an interesting discussion there about how in updates of the book that [...]
My friend Amy has launched Who Said?, a cool audio literature trivia game. It’s delivered as a podcast if you want to receive it that way; or you can listen on the web site. Two or three times a week, she will make an audio recording from a novel. It will be a short passage, [...]
Posted in books, craft, design, illustration, visual art on Apr 22nd, 2005
Meggiecat is a constant source of interesting art-craft-image-related notes. Her link to Japanese Free Clip Art the other day provided this lovely swallowtail butterfly image, for instance.
The designs reminded me of a book called ‘Snow, Wave, Pine:Traditional patterns in Japanese Design’ by Motoji Niwa and Sadao Hibi, which I sometimes page through in the bookshop. [...]
Penguin Books in the UK is having its 70th anniversary this year. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London, that wonderful museum of arts and design, is marking the anniversary with a display of about 500 of Penguin’s iconic book covers. It runs from 8th June to 13th November.
I have been drooling over this range [...]
Posted in books, creatures, design, make, puppetry, puppets, theatre on Apr 18th, 2005
By all accounts the two-part 6 hour stage adaptation of Philip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials is absolutely stunning. I think it has had two seasons at the National Theatre in London: one in 2003, and a second that finished earlier this month.
The daemons, physical manifestations of the human soul in the shape of animals [...]
The Stop Laughing This Is Serious Gallery in Blackheath ran a great exhibition of puppetry-related works during One Van, which I hope to get around to blogging about sooner or later. But they also had a small but interesting range of books, and I have been kicking myself for not buying one called ‘The Snail [...]