Paper Tales of North Yorkshire

Designing Creatures Last week I attended the 'Drawing for creature design: theory and practice' workshop at the Animex festival at Teesside University. Taken by Rosemary Chalmers, a concept artist and games lecturer at the University, it was a fun, informative and inspiring morning using the impressive computing facilities to learn the concepts behind designing our own creatures. The reason I was excited to attend is to help me begin to create imagery for my illustrations of the folk and fairy tales of North Yorkshire. Many of the creatures that are described in these tales require a fair bit of imagination and sometimes I struggle to communicate what's in my head onto the paper! I'm also in total awe of concept artists, their drawing skills are amazing and it's wonderful to see the products of their imaginations, so the chance to be tutored by a concept artist for this workshop was too good an opportunity to pass up. Rosemary began by explaining her backgro...

Kojima lies under her piece 'Byaku' Creating Sculpture from Paper Cutting - Nahoko Kojima - Artist Review Nahoko Kojima is a Japanese paper artist who creates giant papercuts from single sheets of Japanese Washi paper, and then hangs them so that the way they fall creates a 3D sculpture. One of her most famous pieces is Byaku, a life-sized polar bear which took 7 months to make from a single 3 metre square piece of Japanese Washi paper. 'Byaku' is painstakingly suspended in the air from many clear threads. Another of her pieces is Cloud Leopard, which, like many of her other pieces, has toured extensively and been shown in numerous different galleries. Paper is such a delicate medium, all that installing (hanging from hundreds of clear threads), dismantling, transporting (flat?), not to mention dusting (!) must take its toll on the paper! Kojima smartly says that she loves how the paper ‘changes over time’ which is perhaps a clever way to admit that it’s n...