Kiss Me Deer

Here’s a little gouache painting I did to practice deer (and use up paint!) – it’s ever-so-slightly fanart for the game “Kiss Me Deer” as played by the Bennet sisters in the book of Pride & Prejudice & Zombies).

It was also preparation for another painting I was making as a gift (that one is for slightly more limited circulation, but can be seen at the Duck level & above on my Patreon).

The art of scanning gouache is one which I have yet to study in more detail. Perhaps photography is the way to go.

Speaking of the Patreon, if you’d like to throw a dollar in the hat towards the monthly calendar, or subscribe at a higher level to get extra printable stationery and behind-the-scene peeks at upcoming projects, this is a great way to do it. You could even put it on your wishlist!

Books read, things seen: March 2016

Books

• How to Edit a Novel – Charlotte Nash: (full disclosure, I was given a review copy and am friends with Charlotte) A very plain, step-by-step, mechanical approach to editing which is VERY USEFUL as it is easy to get caught up in high-concept flights of editorial lyricism. I’ve been editing a manuscript and used a lot of her pointers, which successfully calmed me down and got the new draft quickly finished.
• Hellboy: The Chained Coffin, and others – Mike Mignola: I loved this so much. How have I managed not to actually read Hellboy before? It is laconic and wry and yet with a kindness, for all the bloody myths and tales. And the art which is so simple and weighty and full-mouthed.
• The Rabbits – John Marsden and Shaun Tan (illustrator): This book! The art is so rich. It glows, it looks flat as a mosaic and then the shapes resolve into sails and landscapes, the regimented patterns move with meaning, there are more stories in the tiny details. It has less than 250 words, and they are the high, clear bells chiming out a fine melody over Tan’s orchestral compositions.
• Edward Grey, Witchfinder, Vol. 1: In the Service of Angels – Mike Mignola and Ben Stenbeck (illustrator): I enjoyed it, and would read more, but it suffered by following immediately on the heels of Hellboy and being so earnest.
• Picnic at Hanging Rock – Joan Lindsay: This is such a good book, still, and I don’t know how? I thought it got away with not solving the mystery by not being about the mystery but about the people left behind, and yet on a reread she keeps pulling it back to the investigation as well? It’s a book about the ripples caused by an unsolved mystery, and about the little things that change lives as well as the big things, the weight of something vast and inexplicable on the world. It’s also a reimagining of The Little Princess and The Secret Garden, and beautiful and dreadful. It’s also made me think that the very end of The Lovely Bones weakened that book’s impact.

Picnic at Hanging Rock sketches

• The Elusive Pimpernel – Baroness Orczy: C.S. Pacat and I stumbled upon a bookstore which was full of sequels we’d never heard of to very famous books. Now, the Pimpernel sequels are certainly generally known to exist, but this was the first I’ve read. It was a much smaller story than the first, really a battle between two wills, which is something I appreciate in sequels (instead of just making the antagonising forces bigger and badder). Also my personal theory is that Marguerite is the opposite of the cleverest woman in Europe, and in her Paris days people only called her that as a joke BUT Chauvelin, who was in love with her then, thought they were serious, and because he keeps so drastically overestimating her, the Blakeneys continue to triumph.

Seen

• Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (movie): Twice. We had so much fun. It was silly, but smartly so (new lines frequently taken from other Austen writing), and the production values were solid. I want to watch the outtakes just for more Bennett sisters as a team. I love Pride and Prejudice and many of its revisions, and a couple of these castings and scenes were extremely gratifying additions to the mythology.
• From Dusk till Dawn (movie): Rooftop cinema. I still don’t know how this movie manages to form a coherent whole.
• Picnic at Hanging Rock (play: Malthouse Theature): For such a visual book, it was fascinating to watch it staged with familiar descriptions but a minimalist, slate-grey set and almost none of the familiar imagery. The night-on-the-rock sequence was fabulously suspenseful, and Amber McMahon’s turn as Michael Fitzhubert was mesmerising.

My rough sketch from memory, and Amber McMahon (photo by Pia Johnson from ECU Daily).

• The Rabbits (opera: QPAC): Affecting and gloriously textured interpretation of the book (see above).
• London has Fallen (movie): Exactly what I expected, having seen Olympus has Fallen.
• Zootopia (movie): Another fun movie, surprising, endearing, quotable and honestly the most convincing integration of mobile phones I’ve seen.
• Hail Caesar (movie): Odd, though frequently gratifyingly so, and less a story than a ‘day in the life of’. I wanted more but also more of this. Peter M. Ball wrote up his thoughts: Would that it were so simple?

 

Today… pic.twitter.com/1OTo9TY397

— Kathleen Jennings (@tanaudel) March 16, 2016

The late week

• Monsters! This new, Karen Beilharz-helmed anthology of comics (with sea monsters by me) is now funding on Pozible. It’s all written and illustrated but we need the pre-orders to get it printed. Rewards include a map by me. (Because it’s been asked, and Pozible isn’t entirely clear on this: if you want to help, but don’t necessarily want a book, you can enter an amount here: Pledge amount). The first comic, “Monster Hunter”, has been posted already.
• Rapunzel: Fablecroft is publishing Kate Forsyth’s PhD exegesis The Rebirth of Rapunzel: A Mythic Biography of the Maiden in the Tower (background pattern and cover art by me).

• Deep Dark Fears: Late to this party, but Deep Dark Fears is deliciously evocative and unsettling, and I have ordered the book.
• Pride & Prejudice & Zombies: Went twice, went with incredibly low expectations, had a ball, see it while it’s in cinemas. It’s also got a number of Easter eggs for long-term Austen fans. But I mistook Sam Riley for Kris Marshall and was confused (although not unpleasantly so).

I'm just saying pic.twitter.com/uZ8Fam3gKQ

— Kathleen Jennings (@tanaudel) March 1, 2016

• Science! If you like science communication and illustration, the #sciart tweetstorm is currently on.
• Two new books:
  • The first translation in over 100 years of Jules Verne’s Mikhail Strogoff, from Eagle Books (a new imprint of Christmas Press), with illustrations and gold-edged pages and just the right size to fit comfortably in the hand and handbag.
  • The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the way Home, the last book of Catherynne M. Valente’s Fairyland books, which I will buy but which I am afraid it will hurt to read because they are so perfect in themselves that I am sure the ending will be like a knife.
• Coffee in Oxley: If you are ever in the western suburbs of Brisbane, check out Re/Love Oxley on Blunder Road – a good little cafe with an industrial shed of old and kitschy things, including pyromaniacal sewing machines.

This is a good cafe pic.twitter.com/SIAQlazPCk

— Kathleen Jennings (@tanaudel) March 2, 2016

• Cake: “If your mother didn’t make you a cake from this book she didn’t love you enough…” Or: growing up in Australia (apparently a hit in Israel too, which I did not know).
• Tremontaine! Saga Press is going to print editions of several Serial Box titles, including Tremontaine (no word on art at present).
• Writing: Finished the first pass edit of the current manuscript (the small shapely one, as opposed to the large amorphous one which is still out with friends having its flaws diagnosed).
• Pretty things: If you like them, this is my sister’s blog: Mrs M Loves.

Love pretty things? Skip on over to https://t.co/2AEv6JZb1a for the fun and finer things in life xx #mrsmloves pic.twitter.com/K2H2KqxhmH

— Bec Moore (@mrsm_loves) February 23, 2016

• On looking too long at art reference: Seals are really weird and if you look at them too long it is like staring too hard at the word “walk” or “amongst”. They cease to be unique functioning objects and become gaps in the world, free-floating black holes, units of the matter before eternity. They refuse to be what you desire or believe them to be. If you gaze too long into the seal, the seal gazes back into you.
• ‘A Plot for the Annoying of the King of Spain’ – this whole stream of tweets is delightful:

In love with the fact that in 1585 Francis Walsingham drew up a document titled 'A Plot for the Annoying of the King of Spain'

— John Gallagher (@earlymodernjohn) March 4, 2016

• Style: Peter de Sève on artist’s style, although I believe it applies equally to any creative endeavour:
  “An artist’s drawing is a catalogue of the shapes that he loves. When I’m drawing something, I’m trying to find the shapes that please me. I believe that’s what makes up what people refer to as a style.”
• Lessons learned: One thing I am repeatedly learning this year is how little you can get done in a day, and how much in half an hour.

 

 

Pride and Prejudice and Daleks

This instalment of the Dalek Game is for Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

As you may have worked out, I love reworkings, reimaginings, reinterpretations and covers. I adore She Will Have Her Way, and was thrilled when I worked out Clueless was a rewrite of Emma (to be fair, I saw it in German first so I was just trying to keep up with the conversations). I love – as I did last recently – watching the Half Hour Hamlet and the Express Macbeth in a park performance and then seeing a community theatre production of Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters which reworks both plays again. I liked Bridget Jones, who has already featured in the Dalek Game: Bridget Jones’s Dalek.

And yes, I have read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and liked very much the following things:

1. That Seth Grahame-Smith had the idea at all.
2. That he actually ran with it and put something out there in the world.
3. That it got published.
4. That he obviously read the whole of the original novel.

And I remain disappointed that it never (for me) quite lifted above a gimmick, because there were these odd moments in the book when it hinted at something more than “Pride and Prejudice… with zombies! (and lots of vomiting)” and started to become a story on its own terms. So I’m disappointed for the story that it wasn’t, which I suppose isn’t fair – it was a wildly successful gimmick.