T & I visited Emburrah on Sat 7th April, primarily to see the 20 years of Pixar exhibition, it was satisfying for the £6 ticket adult ticket it costs.

Whilst we were walking about looking for a place to eat, we turned some corners and stumbled upon a wee gem, an exhibition celebrating Miffy's 50th birthday and her dutch creator Dick Bruna.

I will get some pictures on but now some facts

Dick Bruna was born in 1927, studied Matisse and did some detective novel covers (he's still alive)
The original Miffy character was a toy rabbit
Miffy has received the most birthday cards in the world ever- it's in the Guiness book of records
Dick Bruna takes a year to make each book, which contains twelve pictures and 12 pages of four line rhymes
One of his recent books is called Dear Grandma Bunny...em it's about Miffy's gran dying, hey she's got to deal with reality beyond her primary coloured existence

We watched a film of the painfully slow process Dick uses to make these books

He draws several images with pencil, it could just be Miffy writing to her brown friend Melanie but he does the drawings over and over until he's happy with the one he wants. He then transfers on to acetane, then spends days determining which colours to use, he uses the same palette: black, white, grey, red, yellow, green, blue and sometimes brown. He uses a maximum of four colours for each picture.

He copies the image onto a standard artist board (what's it called Terry?) and uses a paint brush to do the black outline.

Then if that wasn't tedious enough, for the background, he actually cuts round the shape in the middle on the acetone, for example Miffy, then transfers this shape to a blue or white card, cuts the card out and places that AROUND her....T was weeping at the end of the film.