Errantry

This installment of the Dalek Game is for William Golding’s horrible Lord of the Flies, which has made me feel miserable whenever I see a conch shell. It is also a book which I have an odd wish to illustrate, but I think that is just because someone left a Folio Society catalogue lying around, and I now associate the novel with dreamy illustrations. That, or it’s thanks to Bill Willingham’s Fables, with its charming/horrific take on the character and idea of Colin and equally beautiful nightmarish art.

In other news: I have put up some more sketchbook pages (Brisbane post-floods and pre-winter), and Conflux starts on Friday! I will very likely be uploading sketches from time to time on Facebook (if you know me there) and Twitter (tanaudel). (more…)

This is the tail end of the Brisbane floods sketchbook (the full set is here).

By February life was already returning to normal, superficially, and girls were strolling through Queen Street Mall in maxi-dresses:

And not so maxi-dresses:

Session musicians were playing at the Irish Club:

Boys were shamefacedly carrying bright pink shopping bags:

I kept trying to draw beer, beards and bodhrans:

There was jewelry to buy at twilight markets:

There were free plants to acquire in King George Square, and vintage fashion to buy at Mount Gravatt showgrounds:

And coffee to drink in cafes attached to bookstores which are now gone:

This instalment of The Dalek Game is for Trent Jamieson’s novel Death Most Definite, which was both very enjoyable and rather disconcerting, since it is the first book I have read in which characters are getting shot at in the suburbs through which my train is going as I read it, and in which shadowy corporate entities are based on the same street as my office. It is also drawn as an apology for missing the launch of Roil.

This instalment of The Dalek Game is for Mo Willem’s wonderful Don’t let the Pigeon drive the bus.

This bus is, of course, one of Brisbane City Council’s blue and yellow buses, en route to Indooroopilly – a line I took with great frequency for the 7 years I lived at the university, because exams lay at one end and cinemas at the other (“What did you do at uni?” “Read a lot of good books, went to a lot of movies, mostly“). In retrospect, however, I should have drawn a CityGlider bus because that little sugar glider with the crash helmet makes me laugh whenever I see it.

Pen and ink with colours and texture added digitally – for this week’s Illustration Friday topic, “Mesmerizing”.

This is part of an ongoing project raiding many fairytales and ballads (and, although the project is ahistorical, Racinet’s costume history). Our heroine is in a land with a strange sky and papery stars, and has just met a very persuasive gentleman with eyes like chips of mirror.

Below, I have posted the separate layers, because I quite like the effect of the silhouettes:

This instalment of the Dalek Game is for Nevil Shute’s A Town Like Alice, which has nothing to do with Lewis Carroll, but a great deal to do with World War II, Malaysia, Queensland and entrepeneurship, in consequence of which it has always had a place on my parents’ bookcase. I’m sure I would have seen at least the miniseries at some point, but I remember my mother reading it out to us in the evenings, while my father did the dishes and braided leather or smoked his pipe on the steps. I associate the book with hot dusty evenings and the smells of wood and tobacco smokes and mice (so either we read it during a mouse plague or it was stored in the shed at some point).

In other news: I’m now off to the kitchen table to draw new Daleks.

This is one of the earlier Daleks I drew for the Dalek Game, and I’m not sure why I used the series title rather than an individual book (I’m not ruling that out as an option just yet!). However, here it is in all its inevitable owlery.

One of the major benefits of the Twilight series is that many people stopped being quite so snarky about Harry Potter. I started reading J K Rowling’s books in… 1999, I think (I remember being delighted to find a copy of the second book in England in February 2000 with a matching cover to my first volume). The books caught hold of many of my favourite things about English children’s novels – the place names, the food, the boarding schools, the irreverent scholarly fun to be had with history and mythology, and the trains.

I did manage to write a research paper on HP (all 3 books at the time, I think) as part of my degree (my lecturers kept trying to get me to write on adult books, but they had all been done). It was titled: “Is Harry Potter evil? The perils of magic in children’s fantasy fiction” and concluded that fantasy was not evil – dangerous, yes, but less so than ‘realistic’ fiction. My mother used that essay to argue with people until I told her she couldn’t criticize people for attacking books they hadn’t read when she was defending HP without reading it, so she read them through the fifth book (she said she had 8 younger siblings and 3 daughters and couldn’t put herself through the angst again).

I had struck a deal with my younger sister that if she went to the medieval fair and read Harry Potter, I would go to a ute show and a B&S ball, but we each stalled on the second half of the bargain.

When the first movie came out, I was still at college. I think we might have worn our academic gowns to the screening but I’m not sure – I do remember that afterwards we went to the UQ boatsheds with chocolate and Baileys and a bucket of candles and sat on the pontoon on the river, watching the CityCats go by.

But my favourite HP memory is that I was able to convince the university to let me spend a whole year reading it and its ilk – Narnia and The Railway Children, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, Carrie’s War, The Famous Five, The Wind in the Willows, The Secret of Platform 13 (the platform I looked for at King’s Cross before 9 3/4 printed itself into the public consciousness) and at least 50 others. My honours thesis was on “The Role of the Railway in British Children’s Novels”, and I had a wonderful time.

In other news: Here are two trailers for books I have drawings in: A Tale of Two Trailers – the first is for the anthology Winds of Change and the second is for Five Historical Banquets, the instigators of whom let me play around drawing little ornaments for my own amusement.

A considerable time ago, I posted my illustration for the cover of the 51st issue of Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine: Cover Art for Thoraiya Dyer’s story, edited by Simon Petrie. I also provided black and white internal illustrations for six other stories (these are all in pen and ink with digital shading and texture).

From left to right, top to bottom the stories are:

• “A Mirror, Darkly” – Keith Stevenson: About a quarter of the way through drawing the patterns on the scarf, I had the sinking feeling that I had overcommitted. The impression of bleakness and claustrophobia I got from the story may be partially blamed on sitting crouched over the drawing board filling in dots, but the story was effective in making me extremely wary of speckled mirrors in op-shops.
• “The Household Debt” – Chris Miles: The illustration is an homage to the flat composition of golden age illustrations and to Edward Gorey’s Doubtful Guest. The story made me grateful for my mortgage and put me off several categories of food.
• “Bonsai” – Robin Shortt: An brief, lovely, eerie little story which is painful to reread after the events of this year. The story has its monsters, but the Simon requested the old man and the tree and I agree – it seemed that to illustrate the consequences would be to miss the point (although it would be a lovely piece to see done entirely graphically).
• “Nessa 1944″ – Ellen C Glass: I enjoyed the use of an old rhyme in this, but the story is set in ventilation ducts, in the dark! Oddly, I think this is the only one for which the editor didn’t suggest what he’d like in the picture.
• “The Story of the Ship that Brought us Here” – Stephen Case: I love the flowered dress here, but this illustration fell far short of what I wanted it to be. This story flowered with beautiful images – glass birds hung in trees, strange sentient planets, alignments of stars, implanted plant gowns, ships reborn… – and I could never put all of them in one image.
• “Merchant’s Run” – Calie Voorhis: This is another illustration which gave me pause – the seventies vibe of the interior of the spacecraft of the story was fun, but in the end the chance to draw old-fashioned tulips was irresistable. This is my favourite of the illustrations. Originally there was no shading, but the editor requested that the ship be made larger or more obvious, so I put a grey shade to knock the tulips into the background.

Each time I reach the end of a job, I look back and realise how much I have learned in the course of it – which is a Very Good Thing, but can make the looking-back uncomfortable. I learned a huge amount on this issue of ASIM. I was very glad to have the opportunity to illustrate a whole issue (thank you Simon!), although the diversity of stories and genre presented a challenge – I have my favourite styles of story, and some stories are a more obvious fit to the way I draw. It was an excellent lesson in how to take stories which were chosen for me, look at a story which didn’t instantly fit the way my brain works, and try to tease out an illustration which suited both it and me.

This instalment of the Dalek Game is for Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows.

I love that book best with E. H. Shepard’s delicate illustrations – so much gentler and thrilling than later, harsher images, and more in keeping with the lovely, little, wild adventures of that book.

But of all things I love about Wind in the Willows – the canary-yellow caravan and the fight with the weasels and Mole’s homecoming – I love Ratty’s fabulous luncheon basket best. There is something about the English literary picnic – the butter in the teapot in Three Men in a Boat, to say nothing of the Dog, the fresh cake and boiled eggs and ginger beer of The Famous Five, and the Rat’s “fat, wicker luncheon basket” with “cold chicken inside it, coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssaladfrenchrolls-cresssandwichespottedmeatgingerbeerlemonadesodawater -”.

In that spirit, since last Saturday morning was so fine, and I didn’t want to reach the end of the day and have spent it all at the computer, I called up Shayna, Caitie and Karissa. We boiled eggs and packed a basket with cold ham, cheese, cornbread, almonds, chocolate-chip cookies, tomatoes, breadrolls, ginger beer, butter, salt and all good things and went to the botanic gardens, where we lay around on a blanket beside the lake, fending off ibises, ducks, magpies, honeyeaters and water hens, throwing strawberries at water dragons and listening to classic rock on a battery powered radio.

In other news there is a new Delia Sherman novel on the way, with the cover art which threatened to make me spend such a fine day indoors: Freedom Maze - I will post some process sketches soon. I have come home today for French toast and bacon, coffee and reading An Old English Grammar and David Crystal’s The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language to my father, while my mother comes in at intervals to announce that she has looked up the meaning of “atavistic”, or discuss an article on the art of translating from Turkish (family training is military history/nursing/accounting/arts/law/journalism, we just happen to be fans of linguistics).

A dog of indeterminate parentage has a variety of mysterious encounters in these pen and ink sketches. This was my second take on the Illustration Friday topic. The first is below, and is one I’d like to work up further/better – this is a rough drawing with a bit of flat colour. The half-hidden writing says “HC SVNT DRACONES”.

My father used to make maps with us. Sometimes they were three-dimensional models of the paddocks or of historic battles, but sometimes they were pirate or adventure maps – drawn on heavy paper (always with “here be dragons”), singed around the edges and folded heavily until the creases tore. Then my father would punch a hole through them, singe it heavily and stain it with red ink. Very dramatic.