The Girl In Yellow: Random meandering, finding beautiful things

So, this year's Solfest fancy dress theme is 'Characters from Roald Dahl Books'... My initial reaction was "ooh, that'll be great!" but after further thought, it's difficult to think of anything that isn't predictable (I suspect there will be many Willy Wonka outfits) or difficult for a festival.
Hence I turned to google image search.
I'm no further forward, but have found other beautiful things...
Take this for example:

Missed Connections: Time Out NY Competition Winner
This was found via an image result which took me to Sparkplug Minuet, which is pretty and distracted me for about 5 minutes, then I saw that image and fell in love with the illustration. Then I read the accompanying text and fell for it a little bit more...

My costuming inspiration search uncovered more specific gorgeous illusrations too, all related to James & The Giant Peach.
Firstly there were costume designs, for the stage version, all of which are in this flickr set, but it was the centipede that really caught my eye:

Isn't he dapper? I especially love the mustard yellow spats.

All of this got me thinking of my own beloved tatttered and battered copy from the early eighties, the version with the illustrations by Nancy Ekholm Burkert (there's a brilliant blog post about her work here). As a child, I thought James looked a bit odd, and to be honest I still do, but I love the rest of the illustrations even more now than I did then. They have such a dreamlike quality to them, and capture that combination of silly playfulness and darker, scarier things that Dahl does so well...