Illustration Friday: Late

This week’s Illustration Friday picture is a sampler of scratchboard textures and also an illustration for one of my favourite books: Joan Lindsay’s Time Without Clocks, a memoir of artistic life (she was an artist and author, her husband an artist who became curator of the National Gallery) in Australia between the wars. She and her husband were visited by one of her old friends, and while the men were elsewhere, Joan and her friend sat in the living room working on a story they had been writing together when they were studying. The clock was broken, and so when they thought it was about four, they stuck a piece of paper to the clock with “four o’clock” written on it, and when they thought half an hour must have passed, updated it accordingly.

Here is a colour version: