Cover illustration: Laurie J Marks’ Dancing Jack

Here is the scratchboard Dancing Jack I designed for Laurie J Marks’ classic fantasy of mysteries and magic, automata and riverboats, is out of print no longer!

Now back in print, from the acclaimed award-winning author. Memories of loss drive Ash of Ashland to take her dog and leave her farm, to seek out the fate of her brother’s children. But she is taken hostage on a renegade riverboat and is forced to travel against the current, toward the past, where a lost king, lost friendship, and lost power offer danger and hope for the plague-devastated land.

Dancing Jack is officially available on 18 March 2023, but you can pre-order it now via Kindle and Smashwords. It is such a beautiful, enchanted, flowing tale.

Laurie asked for the eponymous paper Dancing Jack — but the details were still to be worked out.

As usual, I began by reading the book, sketching elements that appealed to me, seemed thematically central, suggested movement, and would suit both the shape I was working in (the Dancing Jack instead of the rectangle of a book cover, since the commission was for the figure himself).

Here are some extremely tiny details — you can see them to the left of my thumb in the photo above.

Out of these, I refined the various districts of the body, the pose, and the balance of black and white (in pencil). I scanned those in and printed them in a few sizes, so I could pick the version that felt most sensibly sized for working on scratchboard.

I rubbed pencil on the back to transfer it down — you can see here that I taped the sketch to the top of the board so I could pencil it in sections without losing my place. This kept things cleaner, and avoided lines being rubbed away as I worked. Then I inked each section and scraped the design out, referring back to the sketch.

The board I used was Ampersand Claybord, and the pigmented inks were applied with a marker. (I do sometimes use pre-inked boards and/or brush ink, but this technique I learned from a workshop Nicholas Delort gave.)

I like those almost block-print style roughnesses and remnants around the edges, so I deliberately overink areas just to scratch them back.

And here is the final Dancing Jack, of death and roses, life and seasons, crowns and rivers.

You can preorder Dancing Jack now via Kindle and Smashwords.

And while you’re waiting, why not catch up on the Elemental Logic quartet, now all available from Small Beer Press (print and digital).

If you do get them in print, those designs interlock. (I posed about them here: Elemental Logics.)

Light Grey Art Lab — World Roulette

Light Grey Art Lab’s upcoming exhibition World Roulette brings together artists from around the globe to create unique, fantastical, sublime, and original worlds. Join Light Grey Art Lab (and their artists) in a celebration of the exhibition and a collaborative KICKSTARTER book & project, beginning Aug 28th-Sept 28th, 2020!

“We are so excited to be publishing this book with 150 new and exotic worlds, and 150 stories. Born from the idea that there are infinite kinds of worlds out there – all with unique attributes, cultures, social structures, and time periods, we took the idea of alternate universes and made a book/exhibition FULL of places rich with their own nuances, histories, and perils!
Join us in celebrating the unique worlds built by a team of exceptional creatives!”

World Roulette opens August 28-30th at Light Grey Art Labs in Minneapolis: opening Friday 7-10pm, Saturday 12-7pm, Sunday 12-5pm. The exhibition will be on display through September 28th, 2020, and visible on the virtual gallery on the website and online shop (shop.lightgreyartlab.com). The KICKSTARTER will be live AUG 28 – SEPT 28th! (Links to follow) The reception will include black and white originals or framed prints from each of the artists. The event is free and open to the public.

In the meantime, here is a link to the Facebook event: World Roulette, and a sneak-peek of the work-in-progress for my piece (which will be available as a print). It was fun getting back into some scratchboard again.

Elemental Logics

All of Laurie J. Marks‘ Elemental Logic covers (from Small Beer Press) in one place, together at last!

These are beautiful and unexpected books, laconic and startling.

I put the covers together over several years, starting in 2012 (!), but the line work was all on one sheet of scratchboard, with branches gradually winding across it. Having a tactile interaction with the original style helped a great deal in keeping it fairly consistent. The hardest bit was revisiting the Photoshop file every 2/3 years and trying to work out past-Kathleen’s rationale in setting up the layers.

Here are some of the very first roughs:

From there, we worked up a connected design. This is the sketch which became the final image. I must have read the first two books at this stage, but the last two weren’t yet available, so they’re more just guidelines.

This was (I think) my first time using uninked scratchboard, and inking it myself in the areas I wanted line and texture. So much less chalk dust this way! All scratched with knife blades.

The last book was Air Logic. Once I read the book, I had to work out how to fit the images into not only the style but the pre-existing connecting branches, and keep movement. I still quite like the running figures in the second sketch from the left on the bottom row, but it is a bit Scooby-esque.

The books are now all available from Small Beer Press:

 

Illustration Friday: Hero

I haven’t done an Illustration Friday piece for quite a while, but here is a little scratchboard hobbit for this week’s topic Hero.

The Boscombe Valley Mystery

Two art challenges coincide this week: The Month of Love‘s “hero” challenge, and Illustration Friday‘s “mystery”. I was reading “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” to my father this morning, and remembering (as I often do when I read instead of watching Sherlock Holmes), how human and eccentric and kind the great detective is. He is funny, polite, so rarely cruel (except to Lestrade), genuinely sympathetic to preserving honour and furthering young love, truthfully delighted to have Watson’s company, carrying sonnets in his pocket and, when weary, preferring to talk about novels than crime.

“The Boscombe Valley Mystery” (1891) has the additional charms of extensive Australian connections, the need for Holmes to say “coo-ee” more than once, and the slightly jarring experience of a proper (if impetuous) young Victorian woman referring to “my dad”.

I sketched the ornaments above after finishing the story and putting on an episode of Foyle’s War, then since I’d inadvertently brought a piece of scratchboard with me, I borrowed a utility knife from my mother and elaborated on one of the designs. If I go further with the idea, I’ll work with better tools and to a larger scale (this is about 11cm/4.5 inches high).

 

Illustration Friday: Dip

I’m getting back into scratchboard after a break (I do like it for birds). This is, as usual, smaller than it is shown here. The original is 7.5×4.5cm.

In other news

• I have introduced my mother to A. E. Housman.
• There may be a change in hair lengths in my illustrations – on the weekend my mother cut my hair off to collar length, which must be at least a foot shorter than it was.
• My sister’s dog is, ungraciously, accepting me as a poor substitute in her absence.
• Since no one else has to eat my cooking for the next few weeks, I am experimenting with cooking: macarons – perfect; roast miscellaneous vegetables – very good; Sayers-inspired omelettes (savoury and sweet) – I made an omelette that worked!!!; couscous in the office kitchenette – effective; boston baked kidney beans – intriguing; gluten free cornbread – dry, but has potential; rice-milk custard – unmitigated failure. I’m sure there’s a lesson to be learned in there somewhere. But the macarons really were very good.

Illustration Friday: Celebrate

For this week’s Illustration Friday topic, a scratchboard illustration messed with (as usual) in Photoshop. I used a sample from a scan of an old painting as the texture/colour in the image above and as the background in the version below. Both are test cases – I wanted to trial some techniques for another project that is happening (of which more in the fullness of time… but if I am more difficult to pin down than usual, this is probably the reason).

Illustration Friday: Contained

A scratchboard illustration (with touches of colour added in Photoshop), during which I discovered that reclining on the sofa half-watching a documentary was not the best position for working in scratchboard. We learn from our experiences. Also from fairytales: E Nesbit’s ‘Melisande, or Long and Short Division’, apart from having one of my favourite titles, taught me the value of keeping scissors in your pocket. Modern women’s clothing, alas, does not run to pockets.

I bought more scratchboard today. I don’t need it yet, but I consider it one of my civic duties to keep up the demand.

Illustration Friday: Clandestine

Never kiss by the garden gate…
Love may be blind, but the neighbours ain’t.

Quite a large scratchboard piece by my standards – 7.5×6.5cm this week! I started with ideas of spies, and Romeo and Juliet, and then was listening to Damien Rice’s version of ‘When Doves Cry’ (I received TripleJ’s Like a Version album for Christmas – yay!), and duly picturing the courtyard, which led to thoughts of Queensland gardens and fishbone ferns and a book of bookplates I borrowed from the library. And here we are.

I have great plans for the new year, because I received wonderful art presents for Christmas: a screenprinting kit, lightbox, Spectrum volumes 15* and 4, the collection of James Jean’s covers for Fables (which I have to read carefully because I don’t want to spoil the last few which I haven’t read yet), a book of Leyendecker’s art and a calendar of 1920s & ’30s travel posters. And the illustrated Stardust and The Graveyard Book, which count because the illustrations in those have me all inspired to start on pen and ink again. Oh, and I bought a book of pulp covers before Christmas, so there’s inspiration all around.

*Congratulations to Leah Palmer Preiss, who has a picture in this volume!

Illustration Friday: Voices

Scratchboard, of course, because I am intent on using up the world’s remaining supply, with the rough edges left in this time because I like the texture. As usual, I have saved the image larger than the original (5 x 7.5 cm or 2 x 3 inches).

This pair of carol singers is a study for a larger group of singers I still wouldn’t mind doing, but probably for next Christmas. I had ambitious plans tonight, but had to do (what I hope is) the final print run of Christmas cards (more about those here). This is not to rule out artistic hijinks tomorrow night, but even I know I should try to exercise some self-restraint and not overdo things (ha! says she who was out every night with Aimee & co from Thursday and at a Darren Hanlon concert with Deb until very late last night and is up to I-don’t-want-to-l00k-at-the-clock tonight).