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HOW WEIRD IS THAT - illustrated book
ABOUT THE BOOK :’ 'how WEIRD is that...' is a beautiful hard cover book with fabric binding and gold foiling, patterned end papers and ivory paper. With eighteen beautifully illustrated colour plates, unorthodox and delightful use of font and a fantastic tale woven around Australian native animals, 'how weird is that...' is both a children's book and an art book and as such is suitable for anyone aged 4-94
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR:
Michelle was born in New Zealand in 1964 and moved to Aust in 1985. She has been working as a professional artist since 1996 and has studied in both Australia and the UK. Michelle has represented Aust twice in the Romanian Inter-Continental Biennale of Small Graphics, her successful entry in 2006 being the Peregrine Cheetah which became part of ' How Weird Is That.'
Michelle's work invariably includes animals, with a particular fascination with endangered or extinct species. The little drawings of hybrid creatures that make up most of this book originated from her readings about the Thylacine and the early settlers descriptions of them as zebra headed possums, greyhound tigers and marsupials wolves, to name a few. She was intrigued by what such descriptions might have evoked for the recipients of these letters on the other side of the world and started to draw these imagined creatures in the style of authentic natural history studies. She then headed off on a tangent of other more well known animals whose names are open to phonetic interpretation such as "sealions" and "zebra-finches" and finally to concocting beings entirely of her own imaginings.
Michelle lives and works in a converted church near the coast in rural Australia.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Singer – songwriter platinum recording artist Gyan, originally hails from Victoria and is long time friend of Michelle Dawson. New to the world of book writing yet so entranced with Michelle’s hybrid collection that she decided to wrap a story around them in search of the rare and endangered setting a mythical tale about the sighting of a Tassie tiger a Thylacine to be exact…An earlier musical collaboration of Gyan’s gave rise to the successful Billy the Rabbit a beautifully presented CD and book drawing inspiration from the life works of Australia’s best known cartoonist and poet Michael Leunig, turning 18 of his poems into songs which went on to scoop a Sydney Theatre Award in 2007 for best Cabaret production.