One of the nice things about attending the Hypercomics preview in Battersea Park was coming across one of my favourite little-known spots in London bathed in golden hour sunlight, which might possibly be the best time to see it.

This spot is what remains of the Festival of Britain Pleasure Gardens, built in 1951, when Battersea Park was filled with a huge fairground, complete with a rollercoaster and a miniature railway based on designs by Rowland Emmett, the Far Tottering & Oystercreek Railway.

Despite the fact that the Festival Gardens featured designs from such luminaries as Emmett and Lewitt-Him and Abram Games, and despite the fact that many of the structures have remained in place for almost 60 years, it was surprisingly difficult to find any information about who designed the garden structures themselves. However, thanks to some judicious detective work, I have finally tracked a name down. He was James Gardner, arguably "Britain's most important post-war exhibition and museum designer" (so say these people), so his absence from sites like Wikipedia or even the Design Museum site seems all the more surprising, especially as the Design Museum does have a page about Ernest Race, the furniture designer who probably designed the lovely Battersea pleasure garden benches (hat tip to George Rex for that bit of detective work).

Although it has been quite hard to find out very much about him, I did eventually track down some information on James Gardner. Thanks to this obituary from 1995, it was possible to learn some more about this remarkable man, who worked as an apprentice to Cartier in the 1920s, and Chief Deception Officer (how cool is that job title?) of the Army Camouflage unit during the second world war, before going on to design the superstructure of the QE2, and the public decorations for Queen Elizabeth's coronation in 1953. No small achievements, by any standards, so how come it's so hard to find much information about him? (If you do a search for "James Gardner industrial designer" quite a lot of pages come up, but it took a lot of searching just to find out his name in the first place.)

Gardner also designed the exhibition for Britain Can Make It in 1946, and the catalogue cover has been making the Tumblr rounds in the last couple of weeks, which seems like synchronicitous timing.

But apart from all of that, he designed one of my favourite spots in London, and since that is where I discovered him, I'll let you discover him there too.

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.

Day #11: nothing. I'm sure I meant to make something, but I couldn't find anything in the mess of my table, so it looks like I didn't. Oops.

Day #12: card design
Here are various colourways of a card I designed, which was based off this photo but cleaned up and practically redrawn in Photoshop, which took quite a while.

I did print one off but forgot to resize it and it was too big even for A4. I didn't print any more off because I didn't have the cardstock I wanted (also need to replace printer inks, because the teeny samples they give you when you buy a new printer don't last very long). I'm not sure which colourways I like best, either.

Day #13: nothing again. Oh dear.

Day #14: First version of this year's Christmas card. It's based off this photo of agave trees in Hastings.

There are also blue and pink versions, because I originally planned to print the cards on coloured paper and paste them to white cards, but that seemed too fiddly in the end, so I scrapped that idea.

Day #15: Version 2 of this year's Christmas card. This is the version that I gave to people.

Everyone liked it, hurrah!

Day #16: Mini photo zine using photos of found faces. This is one of the early versions. The title comes from the Hello Little Fella group. These pics show it unfolded.

Day #17: Really teensy version of the Hello Little Fella photozine, made for the lads at BERG. The top pic shows it properly folded.

I squeezed four copies to one sheet of A4. Each side was duotoned in green and red colourways for Christmas, but for some reason the red version, which should have been pinkish, came out purple.

Day #18: And nothing, again. Some catching up to do…!

Day #19: Prototype mini photo album made using recycled paper and card, two holes punched, and bound with a plastic straw.

It was supposed to be a stocking-filler gift, but I'll have to make a proper one after Christmas, and give it late. I had to prototype it because a) I hadn't decided how to bind the book, b) the ink in my printer was running out c) I didn't have the photo paper I wanted (these photos are just printed on regular paper), and d) I've discovered I'm crap at cutting straight lines and should get a guillotine to do it properly. Also, I want to give it a better cover, so the plastic straw is hidden.

Day #20: Handprinted wrapping paper. This was made by covering a cardboard triangle with gouache and pressing the shapes onto a sheet of wallpaper liner paper. You can't really tell from the photo, but it's a huge present and printing the paper took quite a while. I think it looks pretty good, though (it actually looks better in real life than it does in the photo).

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 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.

They all have their own distinct character, and it made me wonder about all the stories behind them. Some of them look like they must be caricatures of famous personalities of the time (usually not at all flattering!), some of them are obviously the product of fevered imagination, and some just seem to pop up in the most unlikely locations.

These satyric corbels, with their eyecatchingly ostentatious gilding, prop up the porch of a house right next to one of Oxford's most famous churches.

The door between them is rather striking, too.

These two chaps at the Bodliean Library are both obviously of great significance, given their prominent positioning over doorways, rather than near the top of the walls, but the second one looks like he comes from more recent times, which made him stand out because all the other faces over the doors look more like the first one.

The Bodliean is covered in a wide variety of funny faces, although I'm not sure if these ones come from there or one of the other because almost all of those are covered in faces, too.

(More pics here.)

Wondering about all their stories also made me wonder whether there was a good website which could tell me more about them, but so far I've not found one. Pity.

"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]