When Bernice
asked me to do a quarterly guest post on children’s books I was thrilled: not
only with the opportunity to be involved in this project, but to be able to
contribute something included two major passions, creativity and books. I’ve loved books as far back as I can remember
and although I started reading books aimed more at adults when I was probably
only just in double digits, I never went through a phase where I stopped
reading ‘Children’s’ books. I now have quite a collection! I collect anything
that appeals, including picture books, early readers, classics, books I loved
or my children loved, but mainly I collect ‘20th Century Girl’s
Literature’, commonly called Girl’s Own and more often than not set in boarding
schools. There are so many reasons I collect all types of children’s books,
apart from being a bit of a hoarder, but I love so many of the illustrations,
the ‘other worldliness’, the happy endings, the ethos, the way so much skill is
needed in the writing to put across the ideas and characters whilst keeping the
language accessible…well I could go on! Suffice it to say, I love books, and
children’s books are special.
For Spring I
have chosen a series of picture books by a Dutch artist. The first of these
iconic picture books was published in 1955 and since then there have been over
30 books, a film, TV series, clothes, accessories, stationery, badges, posters
and ephemera galore. The books are very
simple with a strict style and feature a little white rabbit as the main
protagonist.
Have you
guessed?
Yes, Miffy
by Dick Bruna.
These
picture books are aimed at children around 4-6, have 16 pages of story with a
full page illustration for each page of story. Each story page has 4 lines of
text, with an abcb rhyme scheme. The illustrations use a limited colour palette
and a minimalist style and yet are instantly engaging and recognisable. When I read them to my own children the rhythm
and rhyme made them easy to read, and the simple pictures made it easy for the
children to not only follow along, but to focus in on the story and interact,
adding in their comments. Those are all
good reasons for these to be classic books – but my main reason for choosing
them has to be the wonderful simplicity of Miffy herself. I look at her and I
smile. In spring we want hope, smiles,
and the promise of growth and these are the emotions I associate with these
books.
I intend to
show you a book related project each season, and for Miffy I have followed the
idea of simplicity through. The simplest
book project is a bookmark, and here is mine:
A Miffy Bookmark
I wanted to
keep to the simple look of the Miffy Books, and to make a bookmark that was
reminiscent of childhood. I started by cutting a piece of watercolour paper
(cold press, textured) to size and printing out a Miffy colouring page from the
website. I then roughly cut out three little Miffy characters from that.
I coloured
the background with a distress stain, broken china, which fits in with this
season’s colours. I then looked at placement of the Miffys and the alphabet
stencil I wanted to use. Having decided what was going where I used Kaz Hall's liquid
pearls and stencil technique (which you can find here) to make the letters. After doing the A I
realised that rather than use a credit card to spread the pearls, due to the
thickness of the stencil it would be better to squeeze the liquid pearls
directly through the stencil and use a figure to spread.
I coloured
Miffy’s dresses in with pencil crayons, using a paper stump to polish up and
remove any obvious pencil lines. I trimmed the characters down and glued on
using matte multi-medium. I went round the edges of both Miffys and letters
with a black pen, to highlight the black lines as this is one of the
characteristics of the Dick Bruna illustrations. Finally to finish I rounded
the corners and inked the edges with a black ink pad.
Since I had
a spare Miffy I made this double sided. I put a different colour distress stain
on the back and wrote a message with black pen before inking the edges again.
It is my intention to laminate this in order to a) protect my books from any liquid pearls or ink that may transfer and b) to prevent the Miffys getting rubbed off with use. However since I don’t want to waste most of a laminator pocket, I will wait until I have something else to laminate as well.
I do hope
you will join me with these seasonal book challenges, and create either
something along the same lines, or something else inspired by the books I
mention – or even share other books you relate to each season.
If you want
to read more about Miffy, or find some images, you might like to look at these
links:
Thank you Carolyn.
Please add your bookmark using the linky below.
Bernice
