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Fairyland
Studio
It's
not what you think; a refreshing, Terry Gilliam-like reconstruction
of vintage graphics in the service of Fairyland and Squid-Headed
Babies.
Based
in Austin, Texas, Fairyland
Studio offers a unique brand of reconstructed vintage
art, very much like Terry Gilliam's animations back in the
days of Monty Python's Flying Circus - classic illustration
and advertising art is snipped up, recombined, and amusingly
presented all over again in unexpected contexts.
There's quite a bit of skill shown in
the work - it's not the hodgepodge collage you might be expecting.
Delve deeper!

Fairy
Queens, Bird Women, and Squid Headed Babies

The
site layout (about which, more later) gives the visitor a
large menu of designs - each design is a section or aisle
of its own, and the design is available on a variety of t
shirts, ornaments (nice!), journals, greeting cards,
coffee mugs and so on. About the only thing missing is kids'
and toddlers' clothing, but in fact the white t-shirts are
available in childrens sizes. Check the "Size" dropdowns.
Not all of the designs are available on all the merchandise,
so you'll need to dig in a bit.
Within this menagerie of fairyland,
one can make certain classifications and categories.
Many
of the designs are stand-alone single figures on a plain background.
There's a series of "Fairy Queens", all based on
vintage images of women remixed with vintage insect illustrations
- like the "Mantis
Fairy Queen", for example - and along with that pleasant
Monty Python-ness there's a neat sort of Rohrshach Blot quality
to these.
Another series combines women and animals
- many of them birds - whether it's bird-headed woman fairies
like the "Grackle
Girl" or the eponymous "Miss
Hippo Fairy". All are clever ideas, executed, well,
cleverly.
And there's the occasional non sequitur
like the incomparable, H.P. Lovecraft inspired "Squid
Headed Baby".

Miscellany
- Seed Labels and Vintage Photographs

Another
small series is the Seed Packet Labels - "Poppy
Pixies Seed Label", for one, and "Southern
Belle Fairy Seed", for another. These really do recall
vintage packaging art and make a nice addition.
There are also a few reinvented vintage
photographs, a lot like those Victorian fairy photographs
that so interested Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
And there's a playfully random sprinkling
of fairies that defy classification. Overall there are a lot
of wonderful things to explore here.

What's
not to like?

Very
often, a store site like this one organizes its merchandise
by design, and that's true here. Each design gets its own
sub-section where the t shirts, coffee mugs, posters and other
items are shown.
One problem with that is that eventually
there are so many designs that a sidebar listing all of them
becomes very long and illegible; while the many individual
icons on the front page, which lead to the design sub-sections,
can take a long time to load and turn into an unreadable wall
in much the same way as the sidebar.
I have the feeling that this shop site
started small, with just a few designs, but that it's now
outgrown the navigation that probably worked very well in
the beginning, when the selection was much smaller.
I also think that's not a very major
problem. Once you get a look at some of this work you
will want to dig deeper and further and find it all.
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