I’ve mentioned recently that I’m collaborating on a upcoming project with my friend the artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins on a promotional film for a new Hansel and Gretel picture book. Clive will be creating the images for the book which will be published by Simon Lewin’s Random Spectacular imprint at St. Jude’s. You can see some of the preparatory sketches for the book that Clive has been creating on his blog, the Artlog, here.

I will be producing models and scenery to be filmed for the promotional video and I’ve been developing the techniques I’ll be using over recent weeks. I’m quite new to this medium so I’m using the time at the moment to develop my expertise in making 3D structures and experimenting with different surfaces and paint effects to see how they photograph. I’m  learning that things might look fine to the naked eye but photograph poorly and vice versa. The final versions will be guided by Clive’s vision for the book and the models may look quite different for the actual film. At the moment, though, I’m enjoying playing and learning!

Here are a few more photos:

I wanted to model a really ancient tree this week, a tree that could stand at the very heart of a great forest, the oldest and wisest of them all. When I started looking into old trees in the UK online I was amazed to read how old some of these trees really are. The oldest tree in Britain seems to be a truly ancient yew in the churchyard of St. Cynog’s in the village of Defynnog, in Powys, Wales. It’s estimated to be over 5,000 years old, which is absolutely staggering; what stories it could tell. This tree and similar old yews, such as the Ankerwycke yew in Berkshire, were the main sources of inspiration for my tree, which I wanted to be mainly huge thick trunk and just a few leaves, a big, solid thing, old but very strong, that still had a few thousand years’ life in it.

I love this description of Old Man Willow in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: 

‘…his song and thought ran through the woods on both sides of the river. His grey thirsty spirit drew power out of the earth and spread like fine root-threads in the ground, and invisible twin-fingers in the air, till it had under its dominion nearly all the trees of the Forest…’.

Old Man Willow was a very bad tree indeed, of course, but my yew is a good tree spirit, it may have to work hard to oppose the Witch’s evil in the Hansel and Gretel forest I’m working on.

I started by making some collage sketches to get the main shape fixed in my mind:

Then to work on the model. I’m new to model making so it’s a case of throw anything at it and see what works. Here are a few photos, from the start to where it is now, which is about half way finished, just painting and the foliage to go:

And finally a young woodpecker that suggested itself from the scraps of paper left over. I think this woodpecker lives in the old tree, and flits about the forest picking up news and bringing it back to tell the yew spirit, like Odin’s ravens, Huginn and Muninn.

I’ve made another model tree this week, quite naturalistic this one, and based on some wonderful drawings that have been emerging on Clive Hicks-Jenkins Artlog. Here are a few pics:

You can see the story of the ‘witchy tree’ on Clive’s blog here, how it started life as a dried stalk that Clive found whilst out on a walk with friends. Recently the stalk has started to have another life, being turned upside down, and inspiring Clive and the artist Johann Rohl, who is collaborating with Clive on a project at the moment, to create beautiful drawings of an eerie looking ‘witchy tree’.   I think it’s just a great story about creativity, how it can flower from modest ‘roots’ and grow in all kinds of entirely unexpected directions and forms. I really love the drawings that Clive and Johann have been making from the stalk, and it’s also inspired the model in these photos to come into being, many miles away in Berlin.

Trees are in the foreground of my mind at the moment as I’m also collaborating with Clive on a promotional film for his new Hansel and Gretel picture book project with Simon Lewin,  to be published by the Random Spectacular imprint at St. Jude’s. I’m making some three dimensional scenes of the story for shots in the promotional film, including the witch’s cottage and some forest trees so I’m making lots of little sketches to work out how the trees might look and how I want to model them:

Having been to the art shop this week and bought lots of different materials to play with I think I’m going to have fun trying out all kinds of different approaches to making the trees. Jan’s away in France at the moment, he might return to find the flat taken over by an indoor forest!

I’ve also been starting to draw from the models and photos I’ve been making recently. At the moment, the drawings are looking too much like illustrations of the models rather than being more themselves which is what I want, but that will come.

I’ve been snipping and glueing again to try some collage studies of the models too. I haven’t done any collage for weeks, and it was good fun to try it working from the models and photos.

This post has ended up being a bit of a mish mash, but that’s what the art table is looking like at the moment!

Ok, just more of these; now I’ve accumulated a few ‘props’ I’ve made recently, I can’t stop fiddling and photographing; I think this kind of thing might go on for some time…….

I will make some paintings from the models and photos but I think I’m well and truly hooked on playing with 3D too. I’m also aware that the photos are looking more and more like stills from some kind of animated film, and I’m now thinking of going in that direction too, if I can afford the various bits of technology that will be required to do it properly.

Found this photo I took last year when we were visiting a small island in the river Havel, on the outskirts of Berlin, called the Pfaueninsel or ‘Peacock Island’. It was a lovely summer’s day and I came across this wonderful fountain; with the light catching the falling water and the foliage on the trees it was a beautiful spot. I’d love to visit the place at night with a bright full moon 🙂

Had an urge to make a little fountain for the cottage today. No idea why, but the idea of walking deep into a forest and finding a tiny tinkling fountain is very appealing, although it might be there to entice lost and tired travellers to drink from the pool and, well, Lord knows what would happen then if fairy tales are anything to go by.

Actually, I’ve decided that although this is indeed an enchanted fountain, it’s a good ‘un, and contains healing powers to cure all ills, weariness and grief, and grant all your wishes 🙂 .

The symbolism of fountains is so seducitive; the eternal life spring, emerging from the unseen other dimensions, bringing an endless stream of pure ambrosia – what’s not to love? And stumbling upon a quiet moonlit glade, filled with the gentle tinkling of water drops is a lovely thought 🙂

The recent flurry of model-making activity on my work desk has had a fairly gothic flavour, with strong hints of folklore and fairytale in the mix too. One of the reasons for this is that a project I’ll be working on in the coming months, with my friend the artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins, is a promotional video to go with the publication of Clive’s new picture-book interpretation of Hansel and Gretel. As I’m now living in Germany, this is a pretty appropriate subject for me to get stuck into! The book is to be published under the Saint Jude’s Prints Random Spectacular imprint; you can read a post about the new book on Clive’s blog here. Clive has been exploring this story over recent years and he’s created a whole host of brilliant drawings, collages, maquettes and even enamelware based on the Hansel and Gretel theme. I think he’s the perfect choice to re-imagine this classic fairy tale in picture-book form.

I’ll be producing some models of the Hansel and Gretel landscape for filmed clips to go into the promotional video, guided by Clive’s evolving ideas and images for the book. Hence the rather dark atmosphere of the models and photographs I’ve been making; after all, like many fairy tales, Hansel and Gretel is a very dark story.

I’m experimenting at the moment with different techniques of construction and decoration for the models. The images in this post are of a model cottage made from paper and acrylic paint with doors and windows pasted on.

Next I want to explore making forest trees, so a little forest is going to start sprouting on my work table over the next few days….