Posts Tagged tree

I saw…

December 12, 2011 at 11:14 pm · Filed under Illustration, poem, Tales ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

I saw a Peacock  with a fiery tail

I saw a blazing comet  drop down hail

I saw a Cloud  with Ivy circled round

I saw a sturdy Oak  creep on the ground

I saw a Pismire  swallow up a whale 

I saw a raging Sea  brim full of Ale 

I saw a Venice Glass  sixteen foot deep

I saw a Well  full of men`s tears that weep

I saw their eyes  all in a flame of fire

I saw a House  as big as the Moon and higher

I saw the sun  even in the midst of night

I saw the Man  that saw this wonderous sight.

The pictures are from the wondrous I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail by Gond tribal artist Ramsingh Urveti and book designer Jonathan Yamakami.
What they don’t show you here is the die cutting that lets you see through from one line to the next in exactly the playful way the poem hides and shows itself. This in itself is an achievement. It takes Eric Carle’s idea of putting holes in a picture book a step further, to creatively reproduce the trick of the poem in visual form. It’s worth reading Yamakami’s blog post describing the process he went through to get to this point.
Are you looking for a beautiful Christmas present to give someone?  Try Tara Books’ amazing handmade volumes. The fantastic brainpickings.org (it’s all superlatives today) introduced me to I Like Cats  and The Night Life of Trees.
           
 You can get both books on amazon, but I imagine they won’t last for ever because they are handmade:

Leave a Comment

just a tiny story

May 4, 2009 at 1:54 pm · Filed under Tales ·Tagged , , , ,

then it’s time to sleep. OK?

OK

olivehole by simonsterg

A fox smelt a honey comb in a hole in an old tree. It squeezed in and devoured the honey. But now it was too fat to get out through the hole.

A cat passed by: ‘You will just have to stay in there until you get thin enough again to get out.’

Leave a Comment

Totoro!

December 14, 2007 at 4:32 am · Filed under film, Tales ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

1197635525-hr-81

My neighbour Totoro… a first.

For Sam, the first full length film he has been really happy to watch (perhaps helped by Totoro’s similarity to a Pokémon character). For me my first animé film. And a real success.

Hayao Miyazaki’s cartoon film is about a family in the fifties who leave the town to move to an old rural house on the outskirts of Tokyo. The mother is in hospital, the dad gives the two girls a lot of freedom. There is a great tree and a forest just in front of the house.

There the girls meet the giant fierce-sounding Totoro, a sort of guardian of the forest perhaps.

They find other strange things, like a cat bus:

As you can see from this excerpt, for a film in which “nothing much happens” there is a delicious suspense, a respect for the child’s eye level and for the Forest too. Before Totoro steps on the cat bus (with it’s ‘Cheshire Cat’ smile!), he hands the children a little package of acorns, which they plant. When they are disappointed they don’t seem to be germinating very fast, there is a wonderful night-time moment where Totoro makes them grow magically and magestically.

You can see why I like this!

Comments (2)