Japanese Manhole Cover Patterns
Frangipani has a gallery of some beautiful manhole covers in Japan. Some of them are very colourful.
Archive for the tag 'design'
Stencilling Carpet
My husband’s grandfather had a wide notion of what might be fixed with paint, and it got more extensive as he got older, until he was happily fixing stains in upholstery and carpets with dabs of paint. I’ve been thinking about him today, because I have been spraypainting a border pattern onto a large piece of carpet which is to be used in a play. The design was cut as a stencil:
Hidden Corners Theatre: See Beneath
The bunraku-style puppets I was working on are for production called ‘See Beneath’, being presented by Hidden Corners Theatre, Canberra’s award-winning theatre company of young carers. This is how the puppets turned out:
‘See Beneath’ is a play by and about young people dealing with disability in their families, directed by Robin Davidson and barb barnett, with the assistance of Max Barker. Its written by Rebecca Meston and the cast of Hidden Corners, and plays in Melbourne and Canberra during July. Here are season details:Melbourne: Theatreworks, 14 Acland St, St. Kilda.
13 – 16 July, Wed – Sat @ 7.30pm; Sat matinee @ 2pmCanberra: The Street Theatre Studio, Childers St, Civic
21 – 23 July, Thurs – Sat @ 7.30pm; Sat matinee @ 2pm
Tickets are $8 concession, $14 full.
Foam construction puppet tutorial at Bear Town
I’ve been enjoying PuppetVision Blog for a while now. Based in Toronto, Canada, it casts its net much wider, and looks at video and film puppetry.
PuppetVision’s blogger, Andrew, is also creating Bear Town, a web-based puppetry project. Part of the ‘behind the scenes’ information there is a step-by-step series of articles documenting the making of Tumbles B.Bear. There’s a useful tutorial about a soft foam puppet construction method nicknamed ‘the wedge method’, where a series of wedges is used to a make hollow ball of varying shape, as well as information about how Tumbles’ arms, hands and mouth are made.
Rough cut bunraku puppets
I’m making some bunraku-style puppets at the moment. They are about 60cm tall. I’ve just got to the stage where they are more-or-less complete in construction and movement, but still rough in finish. This is a stage I love – there is something very aesthetically pleasing about it – and I think it would be really interesting to use them unfinished in a play. I always almost regret having to finish them.
They are moving really nicely:
A few other pics of them: the woman, the man, bending. Now I have to paint their faces, forearms and hands and the woman’s leg and foot; and dress them.
Making of Nature Band Parade Puppets
Over at Puppetry Australia, Sean Manners has put together a pictorial account of the building of the parade puppets for Nature Band, a community puppet project that ran as part of the One Van Puppetry Festival earlier in the year, held in Blackheath in the Blue Mountains out of Sydney. The puppets, five yellow-tailed black cockatoos, four trees and three
waratahs, were made by participants in community workshops that were held over several months.
‘The puppets were initially designed by Jenny Kee; realized by Paula Martin, a local designer and sculptor; the workshops were facilitated by Sean Manners, puppeteer and community artist; and the performance and project as a whole was directed and choreographed by Sue Wallace of Sydney Puppet Theatre.’
The Victory Theatre Cafe and Antique Centre in Blackheath has a cool community mural along one side, that surely must also have been designed by Kenny Kee:
There is also a bus shelter on the edge of Blackheath that I liked because it has been painted to celebrate the puppetry festival (click on the thumbnails for larger images):
I heard the distinctive yellow-tailed black cockatoo calls when I was in Blackheath. They are wonderful birds, quite big – about 60cm – and I always feel its a good omen when they are about, though their calls are somewhat plaintive. In Canberra it used to be quite rare to see these cockatoos, but since the devastating bushfires in January 2003 they have moved into the suburbs. A few weeks ago, we had the first ones in our garden. They spent several hours ripping the bark and branches of a dying gum tree to bits in search of borer insects.
Japanese Design Motifs
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. Its a beautiful collection of photographs of classic decorative patterns on a wide variety of objects (for example robes, laquerware, swords and ceramics), and many drawings of family crests and stylized motifs.
Puppetry Daemons in ‘His Dark Materials’
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 that reflect a person’s character, are puppets. They were designed by Michael Curry, who is perhaps best known for the puppets in The Lion King. Stagework has an extensive website on the adaptation, and its possible to see a few of the initial designs there, and glimpses of the puppetry in some of the video clips:
Operating the golden monkey
Lyra meets Mrs Coulter
Cittagazee performance
Captured by bears
Lyra and Iorek (scene in rehearsal)
In both these and the puppets in ‘The Lion King’, I think the magic lies in how the overall shape and actions of the creatures are suggested. Often the puppeteers are built into the shape in unexpected ways, and they use their whole bodies to make the animal move. In ‘The Lion King’, for instance, the puppeteers playing the hyenas held the hyena heads low down and at arms length, while their own heads provided the high shoulder line that is so distinctive in a hyena’s overall shape. Likewise, the polar bears in ‘His Dark Materials’, are defined by a puppeteer holding a head mask in one hand and a great clawed paw in the other, with just the suggestion of great shoulders in what looks like a flexible curved line between the two, and a powerful lumbering gait.
Bridge to the stars, which looks as if its the natural online home for ‘His Dark Materials’ fans, has a section on the stage adaptation, including a guide to the Stagework site, images and reviews.
Muckheap
‘Muckheap’ by Melbourne’s Polyglot Puppet Theatre was another favourite of mine at One Van in January. Described as ‘a galloping tale of two people who try to clean out their shed for hard rubbish day but find everything too interesting or full of memories to throw out’, it also weaves in a different version of Jack(y) and the Beanstalk, ideas about recycling, play, and memory, and an inventive mix of puppetry and scale. The puppets were designed by Paul Newcombe, and adapted and made by Graeme Davis. Here is one of them:
The relationship between the two main characters was pleasing in the way it ranged from tension and teasing to fun and fondness. I also liked the way it showed imaginative play and puppets as being able to be made out of anything. (The only thing that the actors deemed unable to be worth keeping at the particular performance I saw was a John Howard poster). Its good news that ‘Muckheap’ will be coming to Canberra in May as a Jigsaw Theatre Company ACT Schools Tour, and later in the year it travels to Queensland.
Jonathon Oxlade
For me Jonathon Oxlade was the stand-out performance of the One Van puppetry festival in late January. His short performance during the Saturday night cabaret was exciting, bizarre, gross, and hilarious. Jonathon works as a freelance theatre designer, illustrator and puppeteer.
According to his bio, among many other things, he created The Red Tree installation — ‘an interactive experience full of little surprises for the eyes, ears,heart and mind’ — that accompanied the QPAC’s Out of the Box production of ShaunTan’s beautiful picture book ‘The Red Tree’ in 2004.
This year he is designing ‘Creche and Burn’ (on stage in April) and ‘The Dance of Jeramiah’ (in Oct-Nov) for LaBoite Theatre, and a production of the Dicken’s classic ‘A Christmas Carol’ for the Queensland Theatre Company late in the year. He is currently working on a picture book, too.
