adding colour to monsterville

Just thought I’d do a quick post to show the work I’m doing for Monsterville at Stratford’s Discover centre. Right now I’m adding colour to the diagrammes for the building exteriors. These aren’t supposed to be illustrations, just colour indications so the set designers know how to paint things. The solid-blue items in the window display will be vinyl cutouts stuck onto the windowpanes. As jobs go, this one is SERIOUSLY FUN.

If you click here, you can see earlier posts with sketches and photos of Neal Layton, Ed Vere and me monstering away. The village will be open from the launch on 28 May until March next year.

Here’s the earlier sketch; you can see how it had to change a bit to suit the shape of the village street and the size of the visiting children.

I’m sort of going for a souped-up version of the shops in an old book by Eric Ravilious called High Street and the kind of places you’d see on Jermyn Street, just behind Piccadilly, with all its fabulous foppish men’s shops. There’s also quite a bit of Vern and Lettuce‘s Saville Row page going on there.

Don’t miss the great online book that writer and illustrator Polly Dunbar created for her last post as Booktrust blogger-in-residence. So much work in that! But she has left us with a lovely book and a great resource for learning about how to put a story together.

Be sure to scroll down below the book for Polly’s notes on storytelling! Ideas, character, emotion, location, dilemma… she’s included loads of stuff.