About two years ago, I bought an old book of illustrated children's poems and fairy tales.  I bought it for the same reason I buy all my childrens' books: I liked the illustrations.

The drawings in most of the book were nice, but nothing special.  it was the last story in the book that caused me to shell out .50c.  The illustrations were not credited, but I recognised them; they were bad reproductions of Mabel Lucie Attwell illustrations.

Even a bad print job of a Lucie Attwell drawing is a fabulous thing.

So two weeks ago, Joanne bought a child's furniture set at an unfinished wood shop.  You know the set; a little table and two chairs, like the one we all had when were five.  She gave the set to me to decorate.

I kind of went overboard.  Joanne asked that I not make it too girly.  I've never known a little boy to own one of these sets, and in fact, every little boy I've ever known would've bashed such a set to pieces in short order, but that's beside the point.  the point is to make it as marketable as possible.

Anyway, I chose a color palette of five colors; red, blue, green, purple and yellow.  I chose the colors because they were sort of balanced between pastel and bright and I liked the nice mellow tone.  Plus, I already had them all.  I painted the legs of the table all different.  This leg was red with blue at each end, the next leg was green with purple at each end etc, and the rings on all of them were yellow.  then I painted each of the chairs with all the colors and patterns, but not identically.  I mixed up the patterns so the chairs would be more interesting.  then I painted "Once upon a time..." across the back of one seat, and "...happily ever after." on the back of the other.

The top of the table I painted by mixing the blue I'd used on the legs into white, so that it looks like a cloudy sky.  Then I decorated the table top with vignettes inspired by the illustrations of the book I'd bought.  I used Attwell as a guide and I put Mother Goose in the middle of the table and each corner has a drawing of an iconic fairy tale.  I drew Little Miss Muffet, Bo Peep, Little Boy Blue and Jack be Nimble.  The pictures turned out very cute and they were actually pretty easy to render.  I sketched them on in pencil, painted the clothes and faces in the same palette as the legs, then outlined the figures with black.  It gave them a very pen and inky look.

I'll spend the weekend varnishing the set for ultra protection and bring it in on Tuesday.  It looks better than I'd hoped.  You can't really go wrong following Attwell.

 

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