Goblins

Product Information

The conceit of renowned fantasy illustrator Froud's latest book (after The Runes of Elfland; Lady Cottington's Faerie Album; Faeries; etc. Although the Frouds have never left film work altogether, during the years when Toby was young they chose to live more quietly in Devon, concentrating on creating art inspired by myths, legends, and fairy tales.

I find that in the fantasy genre, too many young painters over-paint their pictures; they're a bit too. that infest our refrigerators, our pets, the spaces between our sofa cushions and in fact, our very lives. If I do my job well, not only does myth become visible within a painting, but that painting becomes a doorway into a new way of looking at the world.The Froud family's thatch-roof farmhouse sits buried in ivy down a quiet country lane in England's West Country. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. I publish books, but the paintings in them are personal visions and expressions, not illustrations of someone else's story.

You even get pages which seam to have been mistakes in the printing process, like a couple of pages are upside down. His work has been featured in exhibitions throughout the world and his paintings reside in many private and public collections. These secondary creatures are often drawn from earlier sketches -- I have many, many sketchbooks filled with such things. So I said to myself: What do I have to do to convince a publisher that there's an audience for this art?

His books include the international best-sellers Faeries, Lady Cottington's Pressed Fairy Book, Lady Cottington's Fairy Album, and The Faeries' Oracle. Despite the world-wide success of Faeries, and the huge acclaim he received for the Henson films, it often astonishes Brian's fans to know that it took him over ten years to find a publisher for his subsequent work.

Wendy studied music and drama at Interlochen Arts Academy, then fabric design, jewelry, and ceramics at The Center for Creative Studies in Detroit. Toby ended up with a role in the film: playing the baby stolen by the Goblin King (David Bowie) and rescued by his sister (Jennifer Connelly). Its a good laugh for people who are even remotely interested in any of the 'fairy-kin' or for people who just like unusual books.What, I ask, is the most difficult thing about rendering his vision of the world and its magical spirit in paint?

We know that the distortions in their forms or faces are deliberate, not just a stylistic aberration or bad drawing. The grid is overlaid with circles, triangles and the like, and where these things cross over is where I place the major figures. As artists, Brian and I are merely part of a long tradition -- giving old tales new life and passing them on to the generations to come.The work I do today still has that sort of challenge: drawing things that are normally beyond human perception, turning the invisible world of Faerie into visible form.