Hedge of Yellow Roses – Year’s Best

The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy & Horror 2015 is out, and includes my short story “A Hedge of Yellow Roses”, which was originally published in Hear Me Roar, and also won a Ditmar!

“A Hedge of Yellow Roses” is the story of Vermeille, a vagabond knight (perhaps), who bears three messages out of a kingdom torn by revolution, and on the way stumbles across an old farmhouse and its enchanted, enchanting residents.

The Year’s Best also has all these other most excellent reasons for buying it:

 

• Joanne Anderton, “2B”
• Alan Baxter, “The Chart of the Vagrant Mariner”
• Deborah Biancotti, “Look How Cold My Hands Are”
• Stephen Dedman, “Oh, Have You Seen The Devil”
• Erol Engin, “The Events at Callan Park”
• Jason Fischer, “The Dog Pit”
• Dirk Flinthart, “In the Blood”
• Kimberley Gaal, “In Sheep’s Clothing”
• Stephanie Gunn, “The Flowers That Bloom Where Blood Touches Earth”
• Lisa Hannett, “Consorting With Filth”
• Robert Hood, “Double Speak”
• Kathleen Jennings, “A Hedge of Yellow Roses”
• Maree Kimberley, “Ninehearts”
• Jay Kristoff, “Sleepless”
• Martin Livings, “El Caballo Muerte”
• Danny Lovecraft, “Reminiscences of Herbert West”
• Kirstyn McDermott, “Self, Contained”
• Sally McLennan, “ Mr Schmidt’s Dead Pet Emporium”
• DK Mok, “Almost Days”
• Faith Mudge, “Blueblood”
• Samantha Murray, “Half Past”
• Jason Nahrung, “Night Blooming”
• Garth Nix, “The Company of Women”
• Anthony Panegyres, “Lady Killer”
• Rivqa Rafael, “Beyond the Factory Wall”
• Deborah Sheldon, “Perfect Little Stitches”
• Angela Slatter, “Bluebeard’s Daughter”
• Cat Sparks, “Dragon Girl”
• Lucy Sussex, “Angelito”
• Anna Tambour, “Tap”
• Kaaron Warren, “Mine Intercom”

 

 

 

April Calendar – The Goose Girl, and other enchanted waterfowl

Since it is fine weather for ducks here in Brisbane, this is a very fitting calendar! You can support these calendars through patreon.com/tanaudel – my thanks to all the patrons who have made them possible so far.

“The Goose Girl” has long been one of my favourite fairytales, although it is one of the few with quite ordinary waterfowl. It’s more common for wicked usurpers to go around changing true royalty into ducks, a habit I first encountered in “The Three Dwarfs in the Wood”.

Sometime’s it’s swans.

But my favourite waterfowl (today) are the plain but helpful ones of “The Enchanted Princess” (also featuring bees and ants that pay their debts).

I read all of these first in two astonishingly-illustrated volumes of A Treasury of the World’s Greatest Fairytales, edited by Helen Hyman and with illustrations from Fratelli Fabbri Editori, although the individual illustrators aren’t identified.

You can download the images below to print at home (either pre-coloured or to colour in yourself). And if you do feel like throwing a dollar or two in the hat at patreon.com/tanaudel, I would be very grateful (and if you support at $3+ a month, you get the calendar early).

 

November Calendar: Unicorns

Days early, it’s the November calendar! I was going to do something complicated with hands, but then I thought: you know what would be easier than something for which I have reference on the ends of my own arms? Unicorns. Unicorns would be easier.

Then it deteriorated into reportage on rampant unicorn-theft, and here we are. (Unicorn… foal? unicornlet? corncub? I suppose it depends on the design).

You can download the design to print pre-coloured or to colour yourself by clicking on the images below. It’s also up as a print on Redbubble: Unicorn Thieves.

I’d like to keep doing these calendars and similar extra art next year, because I love them and hope you do, but they do take time out of my paying deadlines. I’m considering starting a Patreon, hoping to keep a version of the main calendar design free but to give supporters extra behind-the-scenes details, input and material. More detail in due course!

 

The Bush Bride illustrations – for Angie Rega

Before I went overseas, I mentioned I was working on some illustrations to accompany a live reading Angie Rega was to give at the Australian Fairy Tale Convention.

That went very well, and I can now show the finished illustrations. I cut them as one continuous image: the back, with pencil lines, is shown here. It was very tiny. I did not cut myself. I cut myself pretty badly trimming green beans in New York, but this is safer than cooking.

This I scanned in and tidied up.

Because it was to be projected behind Angie while she read, we decided on a fairly clear, strong colour palette. Here is the first of the three slides the image was divided into. The background goes from dawn to day to night.

And here is the whole series as one image. If you click on it, you should go through to its Flickr page where you will have the option to view it at a larger size.

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Illustration Friday: Nostalgia

Once…

The beginnings of fairytales (historic or galactic) are freighted with nostalgia, bearing endlessly back into a past that may not have existed and yet always has been long gone. It’s part of the logic of fairytales that I love, a clear warning that they happen on a plane of myth and symbol. “Outside, over there… Maybe it did and maybe it didn’t… Now hear o my best beloved, and listen, and attend… A long time ago…”

These two sketches are from fairytales-in-development, at the point where I was finding my way into that tone. Pencil and watercolour above, ballpoint pen below.

And here’s another, the cover of a sketchbook for a project with Angela Slatter. This is just for me, but here, too, I aiming to strike the note that will let me enter the mood and story when I sit down to draw (along with a key to the colours I’ve used).

 

Illustration Friday: Prince

Life has been somewhat fragmentary lately (more or less under control, but more commuting than usual). So here are some sketches working towards the Illustration Friday topic. I keep a separate little sketchbook for working through ideas, just playing around and chasing associations, crown angles, etc.

 

Chickens and stories

This is where ideas come from:

You mention on Twitter that you don’t know how you started following the local Hereford Breeders society but that you find it soothing. A friend asks for recommendations for chicken fancier accounts.

The search is unsuccessful, but when you sit down to warm up for some other projects with some watercolour painting, you have chickens on the brain.

Fancy chickens.

 

You are taken by the idea of Fury-Road-but-with-chickens. But also you were thinking about eighteenth century dresses, because of Tremontaine, so you give a fancy lady a chicken.

But you aren’t sure you got the jacket quite right, although you want those sleeves, so you get into bodice construction and bowls of eggs because those are also hard to paint pleasingly. Since this is clearly a Cinderella-type, she gets a fancy dress too. You are quite pleased with these Daniel Smith colours and also with that shoe.

It seems likely Reynolds would have painted her godmother at some point, so another dress happens. Your dad was watching Pride and Prejudice in the next room so a bit of Catherine de Bourgh gets in there.

She’s a little too straightforward, and also accidentally stepping on her hem, although that is an effect you might go for deliberately another time. You like her skirts, however.

You are now enamoured of two half-seen fabric designs, and decide to sketch them out in more detail. A costumer friend would like to make one of the dresses, so these plans may coincide. You have the beginnings of a chickenful fairytale idea, and also that first dress just about captures the feeling of a story idea you had last night when you started transplanting the bits you like of Supergirl into assorted historical contexts. This is now half-outlined and has about 1000 words of test-scenes.

An author friend points out that the first lady should be wearing clogs, which leads to a discussion about pretend chicken farmers, and although you meant to refer to Le Petit Trianon, somehow you are led astray into talking about “fake cheep girls” and everyone agrees you should stop talking for the day.