Occasionally, I weep elsewhere about the Large Amorphous Manuscript. It is not a novel. It is, perhaps, an outline that is twice the length of what the final story should be. It is a tangled mass of threads, the back of an embroidery, knotted and tangled. And yet there are some shining colours there, in a dozen sentences of describing trees one will stand waving its branches. It is a dense, rough sketch which must be refined, have its composition straightened out, details lost and added, lines inked darker or faded out, textures flooded in.

Illustration is easier.

Sometimes I draw plot points.

A quick pen and ink drawing, with digital colour, to get back into Illustration Friday. We’ve had a few day-job conversations involving E. Nesbit’s The Story of the Treasure Seekers, (due to: Albert-next-door’s laconic uncle; the name-checking of the characters in the first line of C. S. Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew; and a delightfully unreliable narrator)  so there’s a mildly Edwardian twist to this image.

There have also, however, been several recent discussions touching on Lovecraft, which may explain the sequel image below.

In quite a cool little twist, I also illustrated the original publication of Faith Mudge’s “Oracle’s Tower”, and although the art won’t be in this book, I will exercise the illustrator’s prerogative to bask in a little reflected glory.

It is part of the following amazing line-up (with beautiful cover art by Yaroslav Gerzhedovich):

• Joanne Anderton, “Tied To The Waste”, Tales Of Talisman
• R.J. Astruc, “The Cook of Pearl House, A Malay Sailor by the Name of Maurice”, Dark Edifice 2
• Lee Battersby, “Comfort Ghost”, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine 56
• Alan Baxter, “Tiny Lives”, Daily Science Fiction
• Jenny Blackford, “A Moveable Feast”, Bloodstones
• Eddy Burger, “The Witch’s Wardrobe”, Dark Edifice 3
• Isobelle Carmody, “The Stone Witch”, Under My Hat
• Jay Caselberg, “Beautiful”, The Washington Pastime
• Stephen Dedman, “The Fall”, Exotic Gothic 4, Postscripts
• Felicity Dowker, “To Wish On A Clockwork Heart”, Bread And Circuses
• Terry Dowling, “Nightside Eye”, Cemetary Dance
• Tom Dullemond, “Population Management”, Danse Macabre
• Thoraiya Dyer, “Sleeping Beauty”, Epilogue
• Will Elliot, “Hungry Man”, The One That Got Away
  
• Jason Fischer, “Pigroot Flat”, Midnight Echo 8
• Dirk Flinthart, “The Bull In Winter”, Bloodstones
• Lisa L. Hannett, “Sweet Subtleties”, Clarkesworld
• Lisa L. Hannett & Angela Slatter, “Bella Beaufort Goes To War”, Midnight And Moonshine
• Narrelle M. Harris, “Stalemate”, Showtime
• Kathleen Jennings, “Kindling”, Light Touch Paper, Stand Clear
• Gary Kemble, “Saturday Night at the Milkbar”, Midnight Echo 7
• Margo Lanagan, “Crow And Caper, Caper And Crow”, Under My Hat
• Martin Livings, “You Ain’t Heard Nothing Yet”, Living With The Dead
• Penelope Love, “A Small Bad Thing”, Bloodstones
• Andrew J. McKiernan, “Torch Song”, From Stage Door Shadows
• Karen Maric, “Anvil Of The Sun”, Aurealis
• Faith Mudge, “Oracle’s Tower”, To Spin A Darker Stair
• Nicole Murphy, “The Black Star Killer”, Damnation And Dames
• Jason Nahrung, “The Last Boat To Eden”, Surviving The End
• Tansy Rayner Roberts, “What Books Survive”, Epilogue
• Angela Slatter, “Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean”, This Is Horror Webzine
• Anna Tambour, “The Dog Who Wished He’d Never Heard Of Lovecraft”, Lovecraft Zine
• Kyla Ward, “The Loquacious Cadaver”, The Lion And The Aardvark: Aesop’s Modern Fables
• Kaaron Warren, “River Of Memory”, Zombies Vs. Robots

Here is the art hanging at the show – “Ex Libris” at the top and “Once” below. Both went to very good homes:

I took part in two panels – the first on speculative art and the second on whether cover art sells books. Both were very well attended (thanks everyone!).

Speculative Art: Shauna O’Meara, Les Petersen, Lewis Morley, Marilyn Pride and Mik Bennett

A lot of the conversation in this turned on the dynamics of paid work, and how that has or hasn’t changed – demands and expectations, the move to lower pay, faster turnaround and so forth. Whether it’s possible to make a living, and how, and whether you can choose and follow and succeed in and live off a single career path. But there is still a lot to be excited about (case in point: LEWIS HAS A LASER and the world cannot fail to be awesome and full of potential while that is the case), and I got to (rather more breathlessly than the topic merited) talk about the chances for people to create new things and put them out in the world (hello Kinds of Blue!) and the generosity of artists (the brilliant resource that is Gurney Journey). I know you can’t always eat ideas, and artists should be paid, but sometimes, brilliantly, serendipitously or due to industry or innovation or kindness the two coincide. And it’s art, and speculative art after all, we get paid to draw dragons, and while the first part is good and right and necessary, the second half is incredible and sometimes it’s healthy just to get excited about the possibilities. I may have begun hallucinating slightly at this point but everyone was very patient.

Does Cover Art Sell Books? Mark Gascoigne, Rowena Cory Daniells, Cat Sparks, Shauna O’Meara

Rowena led this off with a slide show on how she puts together a “resonance file” for her novels, even including photo shoots (much more professional than my lounge-room reference photos of people in cloaks and pyjamas), and Mark supported this approach with reference to authors who put together Pinterest pages of reference which helps a lot in bringing together ideas for covers. I do this a bit myself – it’s a handy way to corral links and ideas which people sent me and also to build up the feel of a world or idea (for some reason, with my own stories, it works better for me in reinforcing ideas after a story is already written). Mark also discussed cover trends and how it is necessary to be ahead but not too far ahead of the trend – that something too far ahead can confuse readers (and bookstore buyers). Also, thumbnailing (how a cover will appear online/in ebooks) and the “blokes in cloaks” trend.

Cat sprung the “what lets self-published/small press covers down” on me, so I talked about how useful an art director is as a mediator of ideas and personalities, and let loose on the trio of typography, dimensions and paper quality which are usually the biggest giveaway, and talked about a short story I once adored and how I looked out for ages for a novel by the same author, and when it came out it had the poorest imaginable cover and in spite of several attempts I couldn’t read the book. I also believe good typography can save bad art, but nothing can save bad typography.

We talked about the template approach which Tor.com uses for its short stories (uniform, professional layout and typography) which unifies and complements the gorgeous art they commission, and the potential for this to be used by small press and self-publishers to create a brand and allow them freedom in tailoring the art while still looking professional.

Last year, Small Beer Press asked whether I would be interested in trying a more ‘painterly’ style, for the decadent, festal beauty of the city of Sofia Samatar’s novel A Stranger in Olondria.

Here are the initial thumbnail sketches (you should be able to see a larger version by clicking through to the Flickr page). 

Here is a little colour study from when I was still working out what I was doing – but in the end we went with the larger image from the right-hand page of the sketch above.

Here is the layout sketch, to make sure there was room for text.

The jacket is based slightly on a wonderfully ornate teal cutaway number my housemate bought at a second-hand shop in England, and I mocked-up the skyline on the dining table to make sure domes didn’t cut through walls, etc.

I had not, at this stage, begun the cover for Midnight and Moonshine – that cover happened because certain people got wind of the style we were trying for Olondria – so there was an amount of trial and error in this. I really prefer to have a single final piece of line art so that at the end I can hold something real that exists in the world. In this case, however, I was nervous and drew four separate pencil layers: figure, railing, city and sky.

Here is the linework put together with the colour flats under it. They make it easier to select, colour and change the areas of the picture.

Here is the full wrap-around art for the cover. The most pineapply of the rooftops is based on a roof of Queensland’s Parliament House, and I now do a double-take when I walk past and see it.

And here it is in the wild, seen in Pulp Fiction bookstore in Brisbane today!

Sable jumped to her feet. “Let me be the dragon!” she cried. “Look!” And she cast great shadows with her arms so that they looked like jaws.

“It looks like a dog!” exclaimed Ella, scornful.

“It’s a wolf-dragon,” said Sable. “Go on!”

Outside, there was a roar of voices, and then a hissing, a whispering.

“Go on!” said Anne urgently. “A great dragon?”

“No, three dragons!” revised Ella, suddenly gleeful… So Anne cast a demure dragon upon the wall, and Mary a reluctant one, and Sable moved her sleeves against the light like beating wings…

I do sometimes write stories - the sort that have lots of words in them and no pictures at all! So (because I can’t help myself) here, above, is a page of my notebook with some scribblings for my little story “Ella and the Flame”, which is not quite so pleasant as these selections from it appear. It is in Fablecroft’s latest anthology, One Small Step, which is now available to order and will be launched at Conflux in Canberra on Friday 26 April.

It is also available in a giveaway on GoodReads (open until 20 April).

The anthology has a striking table of contents, including a foreword by Marianne de Pierres and stories by Joanne Anderton & Rabia Gale, Deborah Biancotti, Jodi Cleghorn, Rowena Cory Daniells, Thoraiya Dyer, Kate Gordon, Lisa L. Hannett & Angela Slatter, Penelope Love, Michelle Marquardt, DK Mok, Faith Mudge, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Barbara Robson, Cat Sparks, Suzanne J Willis (and me).

In March I went to a 2 day screen-printing workshop run by Milli & Fink. Due to ‘recent weather events’ the workshop had relocated from a storm-damaged hall to a lovely little old Queenslander house in Ipswich, with a view of corrugated roofs and Moreton Bay Figs marching down the hill through veils of rain. Not including the rain, our class spent most of the two days wet and inky, with quiet passages where those of us not coating screens or hosing emulsion down the stairs sat around the dining table with piles of reference books, pens and paper drawing designs and eating cupcakes.

I recommend the workshop. We went from learning how to expose a screen to trying out gold-leaf and screen-printing on wood, and were able to print plenty of pieces to bring home, so even if you didn’t decide that screen-printing (or part of it) was For You, you had some lovely, useable work – paper, teatowels, calico bags…

In my case,  while the class showed me just what could be accomplished at home and without even a studio, and while I have so many ideas, the room and mess and time it needs are something for which I do not currently have space (physical, temporal or mental). One day maybe…

You may recognise the wolf above from a cut-paper picture I made a few weeks ago. The picture below, of tree-dwelling royalty, was drawn in marker on paper on the day of the workshop, due to a recent Twitter conversation with Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman, which transitioned into quoting A. A. Milne’s poem “The King’s Breakfast”, a conversation it is to be hoped we can continue in England in November (Sandy interfered with plans to meet in Toronto last year, although I was able to catch up with Delia for a too-short coffee in New York)!

So of course I had to send them a tea-towel print of it, in thanks. Here is the card which I drew to accompany it – indulging in more high-set highnesses, and some watercolour shading for once.

Just before Easter, my cousin Jess married Dave in the trees on their property by the river in Nagambie (photos top and left are by my cousin Joanna Hiron). I posted about the invitation illustrations here: Victorian wedding. It was a beautiful wedding, full of music and family, flowers and lights, with small children and dogs underfoot and (I hear) some hay-bale tossing by late in the evening… and they printed the wedding invitation linework on the stubby holders, which was a first for my illustrations. A lovely weekend, followed by a vacation in Melbourne and road trip to Canberra with my mother (including sketching musicians in a hotel in Beechworth).

And on the topic of weddings, here is a little design I did as a gift for two friends, Thom and Lily (both photographers: http://thomascodyphotographics.wordpress.com ) who were married earlier of this year:

The morning I went on holidays, I received a new illustration job. So that took care of what to read on the flight, and I spent much of the downtime between weddings, touring Melbourne with my mother, driving to the ACT and hanging out in Canberra working on sketches and making some test cut-paper swatches. So this week’s Illustration Friday picture was made at my older sister’s dining table with note paper and a box cutter. But it was (a) done and (b) posted! Several Illustration Friday pictures of late have only made it halfway.

Also: here is the latest cover o’ mine to be announced! Catherynne Valente’s The Bread We Eat in Dreams, from Subterranean Press. A process post will come in due course.

This instalment of the Dalek Game is for my one of my favourite Henry Lawson short stories, the 1901 story “The Loaded Dog”. It is about a dog which on its own caused more destruction than most Daleks, and was a favourite story for our family to read aloud when visitors were staying, or between larger books. You can read it in the collection Joe Wilson and his Mates, available from Project Gutenberg (“The Ghostly Door”, in that collection, is also a classic, but you’ll have to look elsewhere for the dog v ghost story “They Called Him Ally for Short”, about a dog called Alligator Desolation).

I do plan to draw more Daleks, but this is the last I had in the backlog and I have some upcoming deadlines (and I’d like to do some more duck drawings as well), so they may continue intermittent.

Also, I just returned from holidays and now have to go watch the first episode of this season!