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Fancy yourself as a buddy inventor? Then be sure to check out Wallace & Gromit’s Cracking Ideas site and take part in their monthly Eureka challenge.

This month Wallace and Gromit invite you to design a float for their neighbourhood carnival. The float should impress the locals and could contain characters from their films or one of Wallace’s gadgets.

This month’s prize is a family ticket (2 adults, 2 children) to the Wallace and Gromit Present a World of Cracking Ideas exhibition at the Science Museum, London.

Go to http://www.crackingideas.com/challenges for details on how to enter this month’s challenge.

The BIG Cracking Ideas Competition
If you've tried the Eureka challenge and want something bigger to get stuck into, take a look at the main Cracking Ideas competition - you'll need to use your best brain cells and design skills for this one!

Submit your ideas for Wallace & Gromit's next business venture (design their inventions, create the logos and think what copyright protection they might need) and you could win a range of goodies including a laptop, signed sketch from Nick Park, or even a special trophy sculpted by Aardman's model makers!!

Up to the challenge? Got to http://www.crackingideas.com/challenges for all the information you need to get started!

Our 13th Art Yard draw has now taken place and we are proud to announce the following winners to our Easter-themed competition.

Our 5 winners this month will receive a "Woolly World of Shaun the Sheep" gift book, with an extra special model making kit and certificate for first place, signed by the Director of Shaun the Sheep, Richard 'Golly' Goleszowski.

Winners (Pictured left-right)
snoopy16 (1st Place)
skinnymini
heyyou
lenothesheep101
sop

Congratulations to everyone that took part, we had some fantastic entries this month!

If you didn’t make it this time, why not try next time to be in with a chance of winning more fantastic Shaun goodies! To enter visit: http://www.shaunthesheep.com/artyard...

It was announced today that Aardman has begun production on their next two animated feature length motion-pictures, Arthur Christmas and Pirates! Both films are to be released worldwide by Sony Pictures.

Commenting on the announcement, co-founder of Aardman Animations, Peter Lord said “It’s incredibly exciting to be moving forward on these two movies, and I’m thrilled to be back in the director’s chair for Pirates! We love to work in different animation styles ands techniques, so we’re producing Arthur Christmas in state-of-the-art CGI while for Pirates! we’re returning to our house style of hand-crafted modelling clay. The most important elements of any animated film are story and character, and we believe that in these films, we have characters to charm and stories to delight and engage.”

Pirates! - a swashbuckling adventure with a rich vein of surreal and broad comedy - is based upon The Pirates! (in an Adventure with Scientists), from the bestselling series of books by Gideon Defoe. The movie will be created with the same beautiful hand-crafted technique that Aardman brought to the feature films Wallace and Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and Chicken Run. The story follows the fortunes of a cheerful but hapless pirate band as they cross the seven seas in search of the thing pirates love best: adventure. And what greater adventure can there be than battling Black Bellamy and Cutlass Liz in an attempt to win the coveted Pirate of the Year trophy? From the Caribbean, their journey takes them to Victorian London, where they encounter Charles Darwin, an articulate ‘man-panzee’ named Mister Bobo, and an all-powerful enemy determined to wipe out pirates forever. The pirates find that their quest is a victory for good-natured optimism over the boring forces of common sense.

Production has also started on Aardman’s highly ambitious computer-animated feature film, Arthur Christmas. Set on Christmas night, the story at last reveals the incredible, never-before seen answer to every child’s question: ‘So how does Santa deliver all those presents in one night?’ Santa's exhilarating, ultra-high-tech operation revealed by the movie is on a massive scale that requires the creation of a huge CGI world. But the heart of the film is a story with the ingredients of a Christmas classic – a family at seasonal loggerheads and an unlikely hero with an urgent mission that must be completed before Christmas morning dawns. Aardman is working closely with Sony Pictures Imageworks on the animation for this CGI motion picture.

Exciting Stuff!