Instead, one thing I decided to do was go and check out this year's Serpentine Pavilion. (It is hard and shiny and very very red and the cafe is expensive and there's not really much more to be said about it. I also popped into the Serpentine Gallery as I am wont to do when I am in the area, but the Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition was pretty dull.) When I got off the bus outside the Albert Hall, I noticed that there was an exhibition of Roman Cieślewicz posters at the Royal College of Art. I'd been interested in seeing it but I thought it had already closed, so that was a nice surprise (it closed at the weekend though).

The exhibition was good fun. Cieślewicz had a varied career, designing book covers and film posters in Poland in the 50s and 60s, as well as working for all sorts of magazines and institutions when he moved to Paris. There was a strong use of collage which I found quite inspiring and I was looking forward to going home and creating something, when I came into the last room and found a collage workshop taking place. So I collected some printouts of various source images, sat myself in a corner with some scissors and glue and got my art on!

This poster is the first piece I glued down, though it wasn't my first collage idea but more like my third or fourth. The other ones weren't working for me because the pieces were all printed on different-coloured paper and some were awkward sizes and it wasn't as coherent as I wanted. But once I started on this piece it came together really quickly. (the colours came out a bit weird on the camera but it's too big for my scanner!).

After that, I made this one, from just four pieces — see if you can spot the individual elements.

I also took some photos of some of the other collages because I thought they were brilliant.

This fishman was made by the women running the workshop. I later found out one of them was Natsko Seki whose illustration has made the design-blog rounds a few times recently. (The other woman was from Finland but I didn't find out her name.)

This one was done by a teenage boy who kept making it bigger and bigger until it was about half his size.

It's a shame I can't give anyone a proper credit for the rest of these

And here's one last picture, a remixed version of my first collage poster. I ran it through Plastic Bullet when I was feeling bored, and this was my favourite result because it looks like it was taken underwater. Plastic Bullet is fun for that.

I'd like to make more collages now but while I have a box file full of clippings, I don't have any engravings like the ones I used here and they're fun to play with. Anyone know a good resource for copyright-free illos? Most of the sites I've looked at have truly awful search funtions and it takes ages to find anything even remotely interesting or useable.

This one on (mostly) anti-British propaganda from the Victorian/Edwardian era — take particular note of the stuff about the Boer War.

Stephen Worth at ASIFA has a thoughtful post on propaganda from both world wars. It's interesting to see how German propaganda changed compared to the material in the first post I linked to, and shows how to some extent how it lost its bite. Also interesting to see how the Americans adopted/adapted the British "Loose Lips Sink Ships" to "Loose Talk Sinks Ships" which isn't nearly as catchy or mnemonic, but probably had the same effect in the end, which is the point, after all.

Speaking of wartime stuff, my chum Steve is doing a 10K run to raise money for TNMOC at Bletchley Park, a place regular readers will know I am a big fan of. You can go and sponsor him here. [via] And you can see all my pictures from Bletchley Park here.

This post on Roald Dahl covers popped up in Paul K's shared GR items last week, and today I discovered that the rest of the blog has loads of great innovative illustration, too.

Also via Sarah, not exactly illustration, but it does come from illustrator and comics artist, Jamie Smart: Find Chaffy. They are so cute! I want one.

This morning, for some reason, I put pen to paper and knocked up a quick sketch of her within a couple of minutes. You probably don't realise what a major thing that is for me to have done, but it is. I just don't draw. I have such complete block about my ability to even do so that this is actually the first time in months that I've even tried. It might even have been the first time this year. So, it's a big thing to me that I suddenly felt the urge to do so, because it's something that never, ever happens, but today it did, and I didn't even think about it. I just grabbed the first pen and a pad of paper, and drew.

Of course, a couple of minutes in I lost my confidence again, as I made her nose bigger and pointier than I wanted to, and I bodged up her mouth, which made her look a bit cranky (hence the comment about needing coffee, because that seemed a good reason to be cranky!)

Anyway, my point of this post is really this: Jenny Everywhere is a character with so much potential, because she's a copyright-free open source superhero with the power to travel between dimensions! She can fit into almost anything, and she's got a great attitude, and, frankly, I don't think nearly enough people know about her. So I thought it would be fun to come up with a "draw Jenny" challenge — a bit like the "draw Batgirl" challenge that did the rounds of the blogosphere a couple of years ago (not that I'm expecting it to go quite so viral).

Here's the pertinent information about Jenny Everywhere, aka The Shifter:
"Jenny Everywhere has been described both as existing in every reality and being able to shift between realities. This gives the character the ability to be inserted into the continuity of any existing or new work, such as various comics or webcomics. The concept may also be extended to other mediums [sic]

The character of Jenny Everywhere is available for use by anyone, with only one condition. This paragraph must be included in any publication involving Jenny Everywhere, in order that others may use this property as they wish."

More information on Jenny Everywhere here: theshifterarchive.com/faqs.htm

I'm looking forward to seeing if anyone takes up the challenge! If you do, tag your blog posts/Flickr pictures etc "drawjenny" and hopefully they'll be easy to find. If you want to leave comments here on my blog, or on my livejournal, I'll try to post as many as I can next week.

"I think there’s at least a decent chance that tomorrow actually could be better than today, and science and technology could still help it along. That idea’s not really a book. 'WHTTWOT' became a book when I realized that society’s shift from optimism to cynicism was a lot like a character arc in a story. In particular, it sounded to me like the arc of a parent-child relationship. Young children idolize their parents as the infallible centers of their universe. Later, as teens, they realize their parents are ordinary flawed people and the relationship can turn dark and angry.”

[via cityofsound]

Prince Fuji is a nobleman from Cipango; called up to war against Cathay, he loses his ship's crew in a violent storm on his way home and has to find his way by himself. Meanwhile, back at home his wife is being courted by three gold-digging opportunists, all of whom she refuses to consider until she has finished the great tapestry that she started to pass the time whilst her husband was away.

The story of the prince's adventures is presented in comic strip format by this tapestry, with the story of the princess and her suitors running concurrently at the bottom of the page. This clever technique totally enchanted me as a child, and even as an adult with more knowledge of book craft, it's still brilliant. There's a wonderful use of panel borders, such as using the rooms of a building to frame the action, or shaping the panel to match the direction of an arrow.

Another great touch is the little fragments of the prince's adventures that go sneaking out of the frames from time to time, like this panel with the fly-swatter:

There's also a lovely mixture of art styles to represent the different places that the prince finds himself in, from the miniature-style painting in India to lush jungles painted in the style of Rousseau. (click to embiggen)

Although none of the panel illustrations directly copy anything by Kuniyoshi, there's definitely a similar use of colour and composition, at least in the Japanese locations, although it's not as subtle as his. The great battle scene certainly reminded me of similar scenes in the Kuniyoshi exhibition, although it obviously owes a great debt to medieval tapestry and the likes of Brueghel (although this isn't such a departure, as Kuniyoshi was known to be influenced by him, too). Thorne's fabric designs are much more simplified but she obviously had fun doing them, as evidenced by the fact that the princess wears sixteen different outfits — practically one for every single double-spread.

In contrast, her suitors wear the same outfit throughout the book, even though enough time has obviously passed that they would surely be able to change into different clothes. I'd never actually noticed this before I started looking through the book again to write this post, but it has a very subtle effect on the story, reinforcing the idea that they are gold-diggers (it's never explicitly mentioned, but it was pretty obvious even when I was a child). The colours of each of the princess's outfits also subtly reinforce the events of the story, as they always match the colours of each tapestry section — something else I'd never noticed before.

As I said, this book has been out of print for a while, although you can find copies of it for sale online. Alibris has a some copies, and so does abebooks, and some copies are only a fiver! (Although prices seem to vary wildly for no apparent reason)

See more images of the book here.

As promised in my last post, I dug out my copy of House By Mouse, written by George Mendoza and illustrated by Doris Smith. Reading through it again, I was tickled to see which houses I coveted when I was little — as indicate by a pencil caption "my house" on each one I liked. Interestingly enough, my tastes haven't changed at all. I still want to live in Mouse's House:

It looks as cosy and well-designed now as it did when it was drawn, doesn't it? (click through to the Flickr page to see it larger)

Mole's house looks looks like a cosy home, too.

See how Rabbit's house compares to Lettuce's burrow (which is what reminded me to dig this book out in the first place, natch):

Even as a kid I thought Pig's big house was tacky, but Frog's house looks to me like a very classy cocktail bar — but I seem to remember it did when I was a kid, too. Just the glamourous kind of place I wanted to be grown up enough to lounge in. Now that I'm grown up enough, I don't know of any cocktail bar that looks like this in real life:

More's the pity; it looks like the perfect place to sip Mai Tais.

See more pics on Flickr