Sucker for a Moleskine product! I just made this for my brother and his girlfriend as a thank you for many things in NZ, lets hope they don’t look at this post before it arrives in a week…
Thank you card
Author Archives: Becky
New Zealand sketchbook
Recently returned from the land of the hobbits – didn’t really get as much done in my sketchbook as I’d imagined as much of the time I was hiking or recovering. But hey it was an (awe) inspiring place…here’s a few samples:
Belated festive tidings!
Woodentops
I really wanted to go and see the funeral effigies at Westminster Abbey as soon as I found out about them. I love waxworks, death masks, anything which gives an unsettling physical presence – think original Madame Tussaud during the French Revolution rather than a David Beckham.
Anyway, I went to there a little while back after doing a bit of drawing in the main abbey of the tombs, but it was so busy that I retreated into the Museum which is tiny but fantastic. It’s a low ceilinged and lit place with the effigies, both wooden and wax, displayed in rows in cases – I found the medieval wooden ones more affecting and rather creepy – they have arms lopped off, just a head remaining, elongated proportions, rot, all sorts! This is my favourite drawing of the day:
I think I may go back at some point again as they were really inspiring. The later wax ones are rather peculiar as they are totally naturalistic and dressed in the person’s clothes but are only modelled in the places which would be seen – so look like something strangely modern when you see a photograph of them disassembled. It seems that well-respected artisan women (‘Mrs so and so’) modelled the heads which is intriguing, and its all given me the idea for a wordless story…plus I’ve just seen The Skin I Live In so it’s all whirling around in the sausage machine. Here’s one of a stone head in the Museum, I’ve just included it because it was a pleasurable drawing!
I went to Lille for the day a couple of weekends ago and to the lovely Palais des Beaux Arts there, they had a great collection of wooden altarpieces and I am rather partial to these:
Hoooeeee!
Take Thee A Sharp Knife… out!
So – the dustwrapper illustration I did for Lomax Press is published, attached to the limited edition book Take Thee A Sharp Knife! The story is one of a series of humorous detective novels by Ruthven Todd, writing as R. T. Campbell, with a rather rotund Professor Stubbs as the detective. The book is fantastically visual which was lucky for me – Stubbs is always puffing away on a rank-smelling pipe and if I remember rightly is likened to a baby elephant! Apologies for my own slightly dodgy photos below…
Omnis Partners in Glasgow did the crisp and lovely typesetting and design and reused the silhouette of Stubbs to separate each section of the book:
Working on the (hopeful!) assumption that more in the series would be published, the spine also has a small vector of a knife, so this would change with each story and depict a relevant object. Michiel at Omnis Partners reused this as the end of chapter signifier, which I think works really well.
I appreciated that the publisher Forbes Gibb elected to keep the back cover clear of text. It is incredibly close to my original concept so I am really pleased, it’s very exciting to see it in print.
Looking forward to reading it properly with Forbes’s annotations, and all the introductory material!
Magic Lantern slide
I got this beautiful Victorian magic lantern slide from a recent bazaar at the Cinema Museum.
Krakow Rekawka
Paul Merton and Hitchcock, thoroughly fantastic combo
Well last night I went to see Paul Merton introduce the original and best The 39 Steps on the big screen at the Barbican. Glorious and an original print from the National Film Archive. I remembered it being funny and a bit saucy! so with a bit of audience participation – a little too much from the grey army trio in front of me – it made for an even more entertaining experience. Some fascinating insights into the film from ‘our Paul’ afterwards such as how the ***spoiler alert*** final scene in the Palladium when Robert Donat shouts out to the Memory Man ‘what are the 39 steps?!’ was done: apparently RD was appearing through a hole cut out of a large sheet of glass onto which a photograph of the Palladium crowd from the stage is projected, because they didn’t have the money to do it. Which is why it looks so weird. Love it!
Anyway a brief Q&A after with some frantic arm-waving from me before the end of the session, as I was in the back row and Mr M couldn’t see me, allowed me to get a question in about H’s storyboards, so after that I was like an excited child for the rest of the evening!
Off to the studio….