Tremontaine Season 2

Season two of Tremontaine, the prequel series to Ellen Kushner’s Riverside novels, is on its way from Serial Box, beginning October 19.

You may recognise the style from the covers I did for Season One (see also Tor.com’s post on that art).

This year, however, we’re cooking in colour!

I had a lot of fun with this image. A second season can expand out into the world or drill down into characters. This season pulls in more countries and cultures of the world beyond Riverside, but these add to the force and layers of what is happening to our spies and chocolate merchants, duchesses and politicians, swordsmen, forgers, mathematicians, scholars…

Once a final thumbnail was chosen and the sketch approved, the process proceeded much as for the previous covers. I still cut it as one piece, but this season we are reserving key areas for the highlight colour.

 

 

State of the art

I’ve been sick for three days and am climbing out of it only to be plunged into despondency on reaching the end of my current art-background-show and all the DVD extras: Inspector Morse.

There will be others (and I love Lewis and Endeavour) but few quite so extensive or ambient.

 

The Grand Tour Part Three: ICELAND!

Part One: USA

Part Two: Dartmoor

As usual, this is a best-bits version of the trip, where “best-bits” = anything that stayed still long enough to be sketched. You should be able to see a larger version of the pictures by clicking on them, which in most cases will take you through to their Flickr page.

And so: Iceland.

The Light Grey Art Labs residency was wonderful: small, active (very physically active!), interested, entertaining. And Iceland was… I couldn’t process it at first.

I spent my day before the residency looking around the Culture House and worrying about whether I would be able to work out how to process the lava fields I’d seen that morning on the way from the airport.

Because Iceland is, above all, an exceptionally new country. It is horrifyingly young, geologically and in terms of its civilisation. Journey to the Centre of the Earth makes sense here. We all got the theme for Jurassic Park stuck in our heads. Parts seemed like a recently terraformed planet, the rocks are raw and rough and new, steam pours out of the ground.

They didn’t get people until 800AD (give or take a few hermits), and didn’t use wheeled vehicles before the late 19th century.

We looked at sulfurous pits of boiling mud and climbed down lava tubes studded with ice and alive with spectral mists.

There were geysers, and everywhere people made little piles of stones.

Brown stones on clifftops, white stones in niches and arranged in little standing spirals below basalt cliffs.

(This evidence of people marking, decorating, understanding, playing was one of my favourite things).

The lakes steamed. We scrambled over crevasses and into ravines.

We marvelled at the pleated fans of basalt columns, drew volcanic plains and details of moss. Climbed. Watched. Took photos. Thought.

It was wonderful travelling with other artists. Learning from each other over wine in our cabin on Blueberry Hill.

We all approached work and landscape differently, but it was grand to be with people who understood spending half an hour recording the texture of a rock.

Or marvelling at light, or pointing out the rare welcome smoothness of a glacial stone after the raw sharpness of all the others.

We fell in love with moss.

 

It wasn’t like a fairytale.

Fairytales feel older than Iceland does.

It has fairytales, of course, but we had to learn to look at the land differently. And you start to understand where fairytales come from.

Growing up in Euro-centric Australia, you know there’s ancient and continuous human history but don’t really see it. We’re not taught to see it. We see European history, barely over 2 centuries of it, and then we go to Europe and envy them their castles and forts and standing stones.

Then to go to Iceland, and see their European history is longer than ours, but not by that much, relatively.

And before that? There’s no weight of human story.

I hadn’t realised that I was aware of that, until I came home.

But Iceland was exceptionally beautiful, full of curious microcosms and great raw new-birthed slabs and extrusions of uneroded mountain.

Ash-soft plains.

New-cut gorges.

Horizon-capping glaciers.

Sheep and puffins.

Then I was back in Reykjavik for one more day: museums and movies.

Then on to Oslo.

 

How to: Make a spare ribbon bookmark for your journal

This is for the type of notebook with a spine you can look down when the book is open (hardcover or case bound).

1. Cut the cardboard to go down the spine: Cut a strip of light card. It should be about half the height of the book, and just wide enough to slip down the spine when the book is open. 1cm worked for this Moleskine journal. If in doubt, cut it a little bit too wide, then trim it down until it fits.
2. Cut the bookmark ribbon: Use a ribbon that is narrower than the thickness of the closed book. Cut a piece that is at least 6cm longer than the book (A bit over 2 inches). I like to keep the ribbon long, then trim it to length when I’m finished (cut it at an angle, to stop fraying). You can also use more than one ribbon, if you want lots of bookmarks.
3. Attach the ribbon to the card: Attach your ribbon(s) to the top of the strip of card. Overlap the ends, rather than matching them up (see the photos above) – basically, the ribbon should come off the card like a whip off a handle. Staple ribbon and card together, then wrap the join with masking or duct tape for durability.
4. Attach bookmark to book: Open the book flat, then slide the strip of card all the way into the hollow spine, leaving the ribbon hanging out. When the book is closed, it should hold the card snugly in place.
5. Reusing the bookmark: The bookmark should pull out easily when you want to add it to a new journal.

(Edited for clarity)

 

September Calendar

The calendars happen in downtime when I can’t work on other projects (e.g. I’m in a library and can’t really use knives, or the light’s bad), so I’m slithering in under the wire with the September calendar!

This one started with pattern composition technique Lindsay Nohl taught us at the Iceland residency, then  … got out of hand.

Colour flats (and texture). The colour is based on the William Morris “Compton” design. Once I get my actual work done, I will put together the repeating design, but I have to draw the connecting bits. In the meantime, the non-repeating version is up on Redbubble on notebooks, shirts, etc.

If you click on the images below, you should be able to print them either in colour or to colour.

 

The Grand Tour Part Two: Dartmoor

Part One: USA

Part Three: Iceland!

As usual, this is a best-bits version of the trip, where “best-bits” = anything that stayed still long enough to be sketched. You should be able to see a larger version of the pictures by clicking on them, which in most cases will take you through to their Flickr page.

I was on a round-the-world ticket so I guess that is why I had to sleep in Helsinki airport between NYC and Heathrow.

Once landed, I picked up my hire car and drove directly to Dartmoor – unexpectedly passing Stonehenge in the evening sunlight. I spent the whole week in one town and it was of course wonderful, because it’s the sort of town where even the local scandals feel like the start of a Midsomer Murders episode, and it is full of many friends who are busy writing and painting and making things.

I was there a few days earlier than originally planned, but Terri soon found me hanging over this gate, drawing sheep.

I spent my first few nights at Greenbank B&B, a 10 minute walk out of town, and I highly recommend it. They had poultry and a bad-tempered parrot and dogs and a great big Aga stove and lent me Cold Comfort Farm.

Some notes on Cold Comfort Farm.

I went back to visit several times after moving on.

And this was the road along the back fence.

When drawing English plants, Liberty prints suddenly make a lot more sense.

 

Sheep-shearing at Greenbank.

And one night, on sunset, I walked up the top of Maldon Hill barefoot in the cold golden light, which was chilly but felt important, especially as I was thinking about Picnic at Hanging Rock for academic reasons at the time.

Here is Terri’s beloved Tilly, being mystical in the woods.

 

For Ruth’s birthday, we went to a ’70s space disco in a Devon field.

After Greenbank, I moved in with the lovely Elizabeth-Jane, harpist and dealer in sugar-mice.

Her house was full of music and books, and one evening we went down to the woods where Alex was living and owls hooted overhead.

Also, I finally visited Chagfarm!

At the farm I drew goats and pigs (for reference), and one evening I drove out over the moors and drew the Dartmoor sheep and ponies.

Showing my sitters their portraits.

You have to drive carefully over the moor – the sheep and ponies are unruffled by traffic.

I did leave Chagford once to go to Moretonhampstead and see the Widdershins exhibition with Virginia (whose hand and art are shown here).

One of the many things I love is that you can just go… walking out over the fields and the moor: up behind the studios with Terri and Tilly, over the common with Alan and Virginia after tea, wandering over to Todd’s for maps, traipsing out by moonlight with Elizabeth-Jane in search of standing stones which look deceptively like sheep.

One last sketch of goats and parking inspectors, then off to Heathrow again. The last song to play on the radio as I reached the airport was, suitably, “Jerusalem.”

Then, off to Reykjavik.

Next: Iceland!

 

The Grand Tour Part One: The USA

Part Two: Dartmoor

Part Three: Iceland

As usual, this is a best-bits version of the trip, where “best-bits” = anything that stayed still long enough to be sketched. You should be able to see a larger version of the pictures by clicking on them, which in most cases will take you through to their Flickr page.

So: Once upon a time it was almost winter in Brisbane, as you can tell by… the shawl on the left hand page, I guess. Then I flew north. I am reliably informed that was the only cold week Brisbane had this winter.

At the airport I drew various hi-vis dramas out on the tarmac. This is one of my favourite things to draw.

On the aeroplane, I drew Cinderella-Die Hard mashups but that is for another post.

In LA, I stayed with Katharine (aka The Fictator: a lot of you don’t know her but you should) and in a surprise to absolutely no-one we talked about books and stories and old movies. She was the best person to stay with in LA because she actively loves its geology, geography, history and likes driving. She took me to very odd museums, such as the cumulatively bewildering Museum of Jurassic Technology which feels like it was created by the protagonists of Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum and had Borges in the bookstore.

We also went to the Last Bookstore.

California is full of palm trees. Someone should have warned me. I got Josh Ritter’s California stuck in my head.

 

NEW YORK! I like New York. I like the New York in which my friends live. Ellen and Delia sent me to the theatre (Something Rotten and Fun Home, the latter with Eliza and Karen), took me to the theatre (Shuffle Along) and to Klezmer concerts. I accidentally wandered into a theatre reading.

I ate pastry with editors and lunches with art directors and found my pictures at the Society of Illustrators! (Thanks Irene, Miriam and Christine!
Genevieve took me to the Museum of the Moving Image and (almost as importantly) a grilled cheese cafe. We both promptly downloaded Ginger Rogers and the Mystery of the Scarlet Cloak.

 

Then a final evening of wine and chocolate among the New York rooftops before I caught the train to Massachusetts to stay with Kelly and Gavin.

We had a lot of pool parties in Massachusetts. And writing, of course! It was a pretty productive week: workshopping novels and reading manuscripts and finishing illustrations off for Small Beer Press. I also met Cassie’s Scottish Fold, Maggie, a beautiful creature who regarded me with deep suspicion. And of course the writing barn which is even prettier than this article makes out.

 

This were some of my notes from a workshop with Holly.

Then: Readercon! It was my first Readercon, and I had a grand time, catching up with and meeting many very excellent people and lying around talking about theatre and Sayers, Broadway and Dunnett. If I try to list everyone I will (a) sound like I’m namedropping and (b) forget people.

I moderated two panels, was on a third and gave a reading from my Masters novella-in-progress.

And the next day, I left for England.

Next: Dartmoor