Tag Archives: Pj Lynch

Murals with PJ Lynch

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Photo PJ took just as Niamh and myself began to work on our walls.

As part of his Laureate na nÓg Big Picture project, my good pal and birthday bud, PJ Lynch took on the task of organising SIX permanent murals (or muriels, as we say in Dublin) for a school in Cork, the very lovely Gaelscoil Mhainistir na Corann in Midleton. He invited Niamh Sharkey, Chris Judge, Lauren O’Neill, Michael and myself to join him and each take on a wall. Here are some photos of each mural as it happened, from blank to finished – click on the first photo to get larger images and some notes on what’s happening. Then keep clicking right.

PJ’s wall; The Children of Lir

PJ had prepped his piece. Drawn the outline, blown it up on the computer and printed it out onto A4 sheets. Here he has reassembled the image on the wall.
He transferred it onto the wall using graphite paper (like carbon paper but not as dirty) tucked in behind the drawing.
First colours in
more layers of colour.. PJ worked in ordinary paints at first but on day two he switched to oils and began all the detail work..
Phew! Done!
finished piece – The Children of Lir – the colours are gorgeous and it looks like it has always been on this wall. There’s a real feeling of depth.

Niamh’s wall; the King of Ireland

Sizing up the wall- how to begin?
Putting on gesso – a ground which allows Niamh to add texture
Once that was dry Niamh added a layer of pale orange with gold dust in it!
After a bit of a nervous wait for the loan of a projector Niamh projected the images from her book onto the wall and drew the lines on (Chris and Lauren also used projectors to get their images up onto the wall. The ever-positive and effervescent Muinteoir Grainne looks on.
End of day one and some basic colour on but loads still to do. Note the colour of the moon – purple and black underpainting.
Coffee break on day two
Final image – the colours positively glow on the wall! It packs a fantastic punch as you come through the door.

Lauren’s wall; Gulliver in Lilliput

Lauren on day one, getting the basic colours in, mixing them so they mimic the watercolour original in the book. Lauren used a projector to blow up an image from her book.
end of day one and Lauren has a lot done.
End of day two and all the colours and lines are in and the whole thing comes alive and pops off the wall. It looked even more lovely next day when daylight hit it. The kids loved finding the small details in the foreground when they viewed it with PJ.

Chris’s wall; Irish Creatures, Past & Present

Chris is in love with his wall…
first colour
Chris did a mural of Irish creatures, past and present, dominated by a basking shark
Irish elk (extinct monster of a yoke) and badger and hare
eyes and mouths go on the jellyfish using Posca markers
As much of the mural as I could get in! Chris tackled the largest wall, began on the wall last and finished on Sunday afternoon! It looks fab, great strong fun images for a slightly dark corridor.

My wall; image from The Long March

My wall. I came prepared with the drawing of Choona from the book blown up and printed out on sheets of A3 paper. Here I’m using it to decide where the hills and cliff lines should be pencilled on.
paints and brushes ready to go
basic grey for sky in – a relief to finally have paint on the wall
blocking in all the basic greys
beginning to paint in the detail
Now that the background is almost all done I need to draw in the outline for the figure. I’m using graphite paper (the dark grey sheet behind the photocopies) and I draw on top of this photocopy to transfer the lines.
End of day one and I’m happy with how far I’ve got.
Grey mixed for painting Choona. This all landed upside-down on the floor when I knocked the palette off my ladder 😦 Luckily I’d kept some back…
The cliff is done and the eagle shadow; onto the figure.
Blocking in the greys. Then everything goes wrong when I paint Choona’s face. It’s a mess. I panic. Niamh comes upstairs to calm me down but it’s a couple of hours before Im back on track and I have to ask everyone who drops by to keep moving as I’m running out of time. Once I redo the face I relax a bit but now I’m racing the clock to get everything else done.
So no time to stop and take photos of the mistakes and panic! Here I am down to the wire with some details left to do and the outline
Done! It was 8.30 pm when we left the school on Sunday night, relieved, wrecked and giddy!
Phew!

The school requested an image from my book The Long March (see two previous blogposts) as Midleton is home to the Feathers sculpture which commemorates the Choctaw gift to Ireland in 1847.

The whole team -Niamh Sharkey, Chris Judge, Jenny Murray (CBI), Lauren O’Neill, me, Aingeala (L na nÓg project manager), PJ Lynch – Laureate na nÓg.

Aingeala and Jenny looked after us so well (of course) and the school laid on a constant supply of sandwiches and scones and smiles and encouragement plus a laughter-filled night with the teachers at Muinteoir Gráinne’s on Saturday night. Unfortunately Michael was sick – whooping cough – and missed the trip, but he will tackle a wall for the school in May or June. We’ll add photos then.

Top photo of Niamh and myself beginning our murals is one PJ quietly snapped from the return of the stairs.

Once Upon a…

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…Place is a collection of stories and poems, all new, all set somewhere in Ireland. I was delighted to be asked to contribute to this book put together by Eoin Colfer as part of his Laureate-ship. That was the brief – that the setting be a real place in Ireland – and here is where I set mine:

Kells, County Kilkenny, is a wee village. It’s on a bend in the King’s River and there’s nothing much there but a garage and a small pub called Shirley’s. And the Priory. Or the Seven Castles as locals also call it – because of the tower houses dotted along the walls.

It’s the nearest village to the farm my granddad was born and grew up on, the farm where my mother spent her childhood summers. She brought us there as kids to visit with our cousins and we all continued to spend weekends over the years. As a child, trundling through Kells in the old blue Beetle meant we were, in fact, Nearly There. As an adult I cork-screwed through Kells at breakneck speed many a night as my madcap cousin drove us into Kilkenny city, to the ‘disco’ at Langtons. Occasionally we’d stop, for a quiet-ish pint in Shirley’s or to walk off a hangover in the Priory of a Sunday morning.

PJ Lynch did an amazing job of bringing Kells Priory and my story, Gren’s Ghost, to life with his atmospheric black and white charcoal images. You can click HERE to see one of them happen (1 min), or HERE to see PJ chat about illustrating the book (2.39). Meanwhile the book will be available from tomorrow, all over the country.

Teeny Tiny Ting

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Book

I spotted this tiny handmade book necklace online; I thought it would be nice to wear to book events. When it arrived and I held it in my hand, it occurred to me I could actually draw tiny pictures in it…I drew one and got Michael to draw a couple. When the Emberleys were visiting I asked Ed and Rebecca to add something. Since then I’ve asked several  illustrator friends to draw in it, so now its pages are almost filled with teeny illustrations.

Everyone I ask has the same reaction. They stop – blink – think! It takes a bit of refocusing and mental rescaling to draw something on this tiny canvas.

I was cheeky enough to ask Jim Kay and Mo Willems to draw in it when I attended talks they gave and have every intention of being cheeky a few more times until every page is illustrated – there are a few Irish illustrators I’ve yet to nab. My little necklace has become a favourite treasure – here are some of the images. Look how HUGE my fingers are; these are TINY images!

A Hugglewug from Niamh
Michael’s Gatto – Maybe a Bear
Mary Murphy’s little penguin, Paz
A creature! Addie Geoghegan
A tiny silhouette scenario from PJ Lynch
Rebecca drew a cat in a hat
A bear from Ed
Lonely Beast from Chris Judge
Skunk!

You can click on any illustration for a larger image, then scroll/click on side to look at the next one, and illustrator’s name should appear too.

All these little illustrations are reproduced with permission and are © of named illustrator.

Falling in Love at the Hotel Gunter

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Me, Richard Peck, Laura Vaccaro Seeger, Michael - Frostburg 2007

Me, Richard Peck, Laura Vaccaro Seeger, Michael – Frostburg 2007

In Maryland, USA, there is a town called Frostburg, and in that town there is a college. And in that college there is a children’s literature department.

The college is twinned with Mary Immaculate College in Limerick and every year a student travels from there to Frostburg to act as an assistant at the children’s lit facility. It was one of these exchange students, Maeve O’ Connell, who suggested to the folks at Frostburg (Dr Bill Bingman and Dr Barbara Ornstein) that they should invite me to speak, so in 2007 I travelled to the USA.

The other children’s authors invited to speak at the conference in 2007 were Laura Vaccaro Seeger, Richard Peck, and a guy called Michael Emberley.

We all hit it off immediately and had a lot of fun chatting at every opportunity. It was a two-day conference and we were kept pretty busy, but on Saturday night we all relaxed at the end-of-conference party at Bill and Karen’s house.

Barbara Ornstein on left, Bill Bingman in pink t-shirt

Barbara on left, Bill in pink t-shirt, Michael, Laura and all the fantastic students at Frostburg

Afterwards myself, Michael and Laura made our way back to our hotel, the gloriously eccentric and historic Hotel Gunter. It was after midnight but we decided to explore the hotel together – we’d all had just enough wine to think we were being quiet as mice.

Our tour began in the basement.

The basement of the Gunter had a bar, a mocked-up coalmine, and many many glass exhibition cases filled with stuffed animals – of both the toy and dead variety. Other cases contained dolls – the kind with eyes that seem to follow you as you move. Another case contained a collection of hats which belonged to a much-loved departed resident of the town.

And there was a prison cell.

A genuine prison cell. The hotel was once an overnight train stop enroute to Washington and a sheriff bringing a prisoner through would lock him/her up and retire to a room upstairs.

We peered through the bars. A life-size body was ‘sleeping’ under a blanket on the bunk, guarded by a life-size stuffed lion who glared out at us.

Up in the lobby we admired the fabulous Gone with the Wind stairs and climbed to the first floor landing where a teddy bears’ picnic was set up on the return. We stuck our noses up against a pair of French doors -locked- which led to the Wedding Room.

Not a room for weddings, a room of weddings. Everything was white. There were hundreds of dolls in wedding dresses but not a groom doll in sight. There were Christmas trees (it was April) smothered in white baubles. In the centre was a table (all white) set for dinner. Basically it was Miss Havisham, without the cobwebs.

We crept up the next flight of stairs passing more doll and teddy bear scenarios, Victorian wall lights, plus some random sinks placed along the corridors. We tiptoed past the ‘Black Room’ – a bedroom dedicated to the memory of a deceased country singer. A Limerick lecturer called Frank was asleep inside now but he had told me that everything in there was black. Black curtains, black bedspread, black four-poster, black shower curtains.

My room on the other hand, was all pink.

Massive four-poster with pink curtains, pink bedspread…you get the picture. Michael, Laura, and myself sat on my pink sofa, had another glass of wine, and talked children’s books for a while more before we called it a night.

Michael, Laura and Richard were leaving for the airport at dawn next morning. I was staying on another two days so I dragged myself out of my pink four-poster to go down to the lobby and say goodbye. Of course there was one person I was particularly sorry to say goodbye to, but I did have this very strong feeling that it wasn’t really goodbye…

Within a week Michael and myself were emailing each other a dozen times a day and within a month I was at Dublin Airport waiting for his plane to land.

Ah, Frostburg and the Hotel Gunter! Where love stories begin…

Fast forward to 2014, and last week we set off for Limerick with Pj Lynch and Siobhán Parkinson in the car. We were all speaking at Mary I’s very first Children’s Lit conference – Buzzing with Books. Siobhán and Pj are also past veterans of Frostburg (1998) and we all reminisced about the town and the wonderful Hotel Gunter.

Limerick 4

We had a great time in Limerick. Mary I’s conference went off with a BANG; hopefully it’s the first of many. Bill and Barbara came over from Maryland, and Maeve O’Connell was there too – our three cupids and ourselves all gathered in the one place again! Apparently our  story is retold at the Frostburg conference every year and they live in hope of inspiring another romance some year soon…

Us with our 3 cupids – Barbara, Maeve and Bill – in Limerick last week

And the car selfie, just for fun!

Michael, Siobhán, Pj, me