Saturday 26 November 2022

Joy-Time

On the very last evening of a wonderful bloggers’ mini-meet in Edinburgh, sitting across the table from me in a pub in Rose Street that warm June night, our lovely pal The Swede unexpectedly passed me a large envelope.

What a sweet surprise!  Inside were a couple of things that he thought would interest me and he was, of course, quite right.  As a lover of art, illustration and unusual historical/cultural artefacts, I was fascinated by the mysterious little book I pulled out from the brown paper package:  ’JOY-TIME’ ! (I can’t help thinking it sounds a bit like the title of a seventies soft porn mag, the sort you’d find, as a curious adolescent, stuffed into a bin in a park during the school holidays and be somewhat horrified but equally intrigued by.  But enough of my memories.)

When I look at long-forgotten and probably, at the time, quite throwaway items like this, aimed at a very young audience, it sets off a whole host of questions.  I’m thinking it must be from the early 1960s – but what would a child think of it now?  Would they be able to make sense of these pictures easily?  The art style (with no artist credit) is really striking, with its limited inks and flat colour overlays.  Each open spread alternates between pages of orange and green only, and blue and red only, with the effect of creating one darker tone where needed from the two colours printed on top of each other.  It looks simple, but having done a bit of screen-printing in the past, I know it takes a fair bit of working out and planning.  There’s a lot of clever use of white ('negative') space too.


The illustrations might even seem a little scary, a little stark, to a child of today.  We mostly flood our books now with bright, warm colours and cuteness, not red shadows and blue hair.  And, you know what, I’m reminded (a little) of this style of tone-reduced / screenprinted artwork too, who’d have thought it?!…

… as well as a certain controversial Seditionaries ‘Cowboys’ design T-shirt which I won’t reproduce here.

But away from such adult themes and back to JOY-TIME.  What about the words?  Some of the phrases really bring home the way language has inevitably changed.


This is probably my favourite page below.  Not just because I’m a fan of ‘Birdies’ but it’s the very graphic use of those two ink colours and the areas of blank paper that I especially like here.  Notice the bird swooping top left and the one in the middle at the bottom – just formed from negative space, a difficult technique to pull off.  The blue shadow shapes too give just the right gravity.  And the way the outline of the girl’s legs are red on one side, blue on the other, which we instinctively know to translate as light and dark.   Sorry, but I get a bit of a kick from noticing this stuff - thinking about the way the artist’s brain works and trying to help mine!

Of course these pages were never intended to be critiqued sixty-odd years on from their creation.  They were just made to delight, to soothe, educate and gently stir the imagination of babies and toddlers, born, as I was, into a world where there were no CBeebies or Kindle Kids.  I very much hope that the baby Swede enjoyed it then too as much as I do now - even if for very different reasons... (And many thanks again.)

14 comments:

  1. He's a thoughtful and generous critter that Swede I came away with a bundle of intriguing CDs

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    1. Ah, he is, isn't he? Such a lovely thing to do. (Sorry if we're making you blush, TS!)

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  2. Thanks for allowing us an insight as to how an artist sees such pictures. You are right of course but I might not have thought of it that way, until you pointed it out.

    The pages really remind me of early annuals that were maybe not from my era (The Bunty, Jackie annual etc) but passed down by older cousins or from jumble sales. The kids of today really are bombarded with complex imagery and colour but something so comforting and simple about these images. Not for the first time I wish we could go back to these simpler times.

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    1. Thanks Alyson - I hope I'm not being too analytical but my brain is wired to figure this stuff out in my own work (more problem-solving than people realise, I'm sure!) and I can't help looking at others' art through the same lens. I think there was a more edgy, graphic artist behind these images, whose style could have been used for very striking posters, etc. I wish I knew who it was.
      Agree too about the earlier annuals - even the ones that my mum and dad had as children. There was a lot less colour in some of them and artists had to be more resourceful. Simpler times, indeed. And I love the use of the abbreviation 'o'er'. No-one says that any more - wouldn't we sound archaic if we did? (Will have to try it out in a future post!)

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  3. These kind of illustrations were all over my childhood, my mum especially loved all this kind of stuff. And still does. Your explanation of the process of printing is great- thank you. I love the parrot, would make a great t- shirt/ poster/ tote bag etc. Probably would want to remove the child's face from behind though

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    1. I love that your mum still enjoys this kind of stuff, it's very much of a time. Ooh yes, nice idea about the parrot (agree about the child's face) - I can imagine varied colour versions of it using two different inks each time - perhaps that's a screenprinting project for a future date, I'd love to have a go.

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  4. Delightful! I have a couple of books dating back to the 1920s which plough a similar furrow; they were read to me as a child. I remember the same colours and the text comprising rhyming couplets. Oh, and children and talking animals -trippy stuff! I'll try and dig 'em out and send you a few samples.
    Another Joy Time, however, probably was doing the rounds among us third formers who would trade almost anything for the sight of a naked breast. Or two. I'll get my (grubby) coat.

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    1. Oh excellent, yes I'd love to see some samples from the books you mention, I find them so interesting, so evocative.
      Ah, those old magazines in the third form... different days!

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  5. The moment I uncovered Joy-Time I thought of you C, I'm so glad you enjoyed it. Thanks for the fascinating analysis on the process involved in its creation, which certainly opened my eyes. I find the lay-out very stark and unsettling, even as an adult! The minimal tones remind me a little of those books we had as kids that we'd brush gently with water to make all the real colours magically emerge. Do you remember those, or is it only me?

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    1. Thanks so much for thinking of me with this, TS, it was such a lovely surprise and right up my street. On my first quick look-through I also found the images quite stark and not particularly child-friendly - I think that must probably be in comparison to contemporary and more recent equivalents. It has quite an adult approach and the more I study it the more I get out of it. And yes - I do remember those 'magic' paintings. My sister and I had several Rupert annuals in the '60s and they always had them in those - loved them! Your comment had me checking to see if there's anything like that around now and there is! Although these have black and white illustrations you brush with water whereas, as you say, the ones from our childhood were minimal (yellowy I think?) colours. Whatever, they truly seemed magical...

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  6. Love these. Who would have thought two colours and white space could create such variety? And nostalgia-evoking too.

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    1. Yes on both counts! I tried to find out more about this particular one online - the year, other editions, etc. - but can find no trace.

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  7. They do take me back, though I've never seen them before. Which is weird. I remember some British comics of my youth would use the 2-colour printing process to save money.

    Oh, and they were never stuffed in bins up here, C. Usually in hollowed out trees or occasionally dry stone walls...

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    1. Oh yes, you've reminded me about the comics too. Maybe we'll have to return to 2-colour printing in the current economy, I'd be happy to see more of it!
      Funny to think of finding one of those mags in a dry stone wall, I do hope no sheep were involved (sorry...)

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