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Interesting Ceilings In Illustration
EXPOSED BEAMS CATHEDRAL CEILINGS Header: Interiors of The Winter Palace, The Small Winter Garden of Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna illustratrated by Konstantin Andreyevich Ukhtomsky (1818-1881)
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The Home Hearth in Art and Storytelling
In his book Home, Witold Rybczynski describes a typical European house: Heating was primitive. Houses in the sixteenth century had a fireplace or cookstove only in the main room, and no heating in the rest of the house. In winter, this room with its heavy masonry walls and stone floor was extremely cold. Voluminous clothing, […]
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Writing Activity: Describe a Bathroom
Maurice Lobre – Cabinette de toilette de Jacques-Emile Blanche 1888
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Cutaway Houses In Picture Books
Cutaway illustrations are described by engineers and architects as ‘sectional axonometric’ drawings. They exist to show the viewer the inside of an object, with emphasis on its parts. In picture books for children, the cutaway illustration is quite often educational in its intent, for example to show the reader the inside of an object of […]
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Chimneys In Art And Storytelling
The chimney is a multivalent symbol in storytelling. Chimneys can be cosy and welcoming. A column of smoke rose thin and straight from the cabin chimney. The smoke was blue where it left the red of the clay. It trailed into the blue of the April sky and was no longer blue but gray. The […]
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Castles In Art and Storytelling
The castle is a feature of Gothic storytelling, and commonly makes appearances in ghost stories of all kinds. Dragons and castles also go together. As kids my friends and I played King of the Castle. There’s not much to it. We used a pile of dirt, left by some builders. One person climbs to the […]
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A Brief History of Home Lighting
With the invention of electric light human lives changed suddenly. This change was reflected immediately in art, first by the Impressionists. Impressionist painters were the first to enjoy the freedom of painting without reliance upon the sun, in plein air. Artists from the 1960s to today use light sources to express ideas, concepts and to […]
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The Symbolic Basement In Fiction
In Gaston Bachelard’s Symbolic Dream House, you probably shouldn’t go down to the basement, ever. I mean it. Nothing good ever happens down there. The basement is the house version of a fairytale forest — a descent into the subconscious. We can’t control our subconscious. That’s what makes it scary. EXAMPLE ONE: BASEMENTS AND BEREAVEMENT […]
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The Scary Kitchen in Children’s Stories
Most often, kitchens in children’s literature serve as metonyms of familial happiness, but every so often you do find a scary kitchen in which not all is well. The kitchen is the perfect place for a scary scene because it is at once close to home (in fact the hub of the home) and contains […]
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There’s A Sea In My Bedroom by Margaret Wild Analysis
There’s A Sea In My Bedroom (1984) is a classic Australian picture book, written by Margaret Wild and illustrated in realistic fantasy style by Jane Tanner.
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Writing Activity: Describe A Living Room
As a writing exercise, describe your own living room, or the living room of someone you know. For inspiration, I offer the following examples from literature. EXAMPLE OF A LIVING ROOM DESCRIBED BY DAPHNE DU MAURIER We were all sitting in the long, low room at Farthings, darker than usual because of the rain. The […]
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The Wolves In The Walls by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean Analysis
Have you ever had something living in your walls or in your roof space, or cellar? Apparently the story was inspired by his own daughter, who heard rats in the walls at night. (So do we — they’re actually mice…) Hearing rodents in the walls isn’t all that uncommon. And rodents are most active at […]