Playing

Now we've got a new version of Photoshop elements, thought I'd better have a play with it to find my way around. Who knew a game of consequences could end up looking so perky?

This was the original



P.S. Don't even look at the time this was posted. I'm pretending this is really a civillised time to be awake, and in complete denial that I have the spawn of the devil for a younger daughter.

My New Favourite Book. In The World.

Do you remember this?


It is from a book called The Dancer, The Bear and The Nobody Boy by Daniele Bour and Jean-Claude Brisville. I got a copy from Ebay recently, and it is as beautiful and magical and melancholy as a book about a bear, a circus, a tightrope walker and an orphan should be.




Also, I love the way it has been translated from the French - do I detect a Cockney accent?!


Don't even get me started on the end papers...



This is one book I actually could read to the girls every night.

Freak Show

Bit of a lapse in blogging there...hopefully back to business soon! In the meantime, for your viewing pleasure, some pictures from an auction we went to recently. The Brading Museum on the Isle of Wight has closed down, and was selling off all of its exhibits.
There was a selection of waxworks...




...fairground paraphernalia...




...taxidermy...






...and some seriously freaky shit...





I love this last picture...it really captures the bizarreness of the exhibits juxtaposed with the formality of the auction.

Of course, it was a great day out for the kids too - Bruno the boxing bear was a big hit. Here are Nelly and Isla doing their best Hidden Eloise impression....

Graphis 177

I was fairly ecstatic to happen upon a stack of old Graphis magazines in my very-local-second-hand-bookshop-next-door yesterday. Especially Edition 177, published in 1975, which is a special focussing on children's book illustrations. About 90% of my favourite illustrators are in here, plus a whole stack of talent I had not heard of. Organised by country, and crammed full of colour and black and white images, flicking through it in a deckchair in the garden yesterday was pretty much heaven for me.

Walter Grieder


Jiri Salamoun


Emma Heinzelmann


Daniele Bour


Alain Gauthier


Adolf Born

Happy Easter

May your chicks be fluffy, your sun be shiny and your chocolate eggs plentiful.