I have made new art for Sunday Morning Transport! Four logos interlaced into a larger silhouette image.
The reveal and an interview with me about the process is here:
Announcing New Sunday Morning Transport Artwork from Kathleen Jennings!
NOTES AND EVENTS: Darryl will be on the Brisbane Goes Wild panel at the Brisbane Writers Festival this Sunday 14 May (with Coen Hird and Margaret Cook, chaired by Amanda Niehaus). Very unfortunately for me it’s at the same time as my Australian Gothic writing workshop — it does look like such a good panel. And on this Friday 12 May I’m giving an artist floor talk at the QUT Art Museum (Gardens Point) about the silhouettes I’ve done for them.
Through the good offices of Fiona Stager of Avid Reader, I met Darryl Jones, urban ecologist, who was looking for an illustrator for his urban ecology memoir, Curlews on Vulture Street.
Here is a very fast timelapse of the cutting process!
Curlews on Vulture Street is hilarious, charming and fascinating, and I was eager to illustrate it. It was about birds, which I enjoy illustrating (the compact bodies, the fluid movement, the personality, the variety). It was all about the places and species I knew, many of which (brush turkeys and curlews) were occupying my garden while I sketched through the manuscript. I wanted to read the book anyway, for my own writing research for a project I will tell you about soon! And it presented some artistic challenges.
First, Curlews is definitely not fantasy, which is my usual field — especially for silhouette work. I love the fairy-tale connections of silhouettes, which I drew on (for the fairy-tale/Gothic adjacencies) in Flyaway. (I’ve written more about illustrating Flyaway over on Tor.com — also, for those in the USA, the US edition is now out in paperback and at the moment it’s on sale on Kindle).
Second, I’m not a science illustrator — I’m a narrative illustrator. Story and movement take precedence over accuracy.
But Darryl was keen to keep an element of that storybook quality, and I wanted to play with that line between accuracy and excitement. I had to be true to his writing (even removing elements from the sketches when they got edited out), and create identifiable birds, while also framing and tinting the story. and scientific delight. So there was a pleasing puzzle for me: how to keep my style while keeping the sense of wonder thoroughly non-fictional.
Third, the structure of a non-fiction book isn’t at all like a novel. Instead of braiding imagery into a long story-structure, foreshadowing and complementing it, I would be highlighting and framing incidents and episodes, with varied locations and casts. But the pictures would have to work together to create a handsome, coherent book.
I decided the best way to keep a through-line with a hint of ornament and enchantment was to decide on the composition first. I sent Darryl suggestions, and for the chapter headers we settled on a whiplash S-shape, set into a defined rectangle.
The shape, together with floral details, echoes 19th-century design. But on and around that, I could balance specific details: the sail-shaped tail of a turkey, the coils of cane chairs and spiral notebooks and cages.
It was a joy to illustrate, from puzzling out how to get 3d wire netting to ‘read’ clearly in silhouette, to the freedom of cutting out a sequence of tiny stand-alone birds to function as dividers within the chapters.
Here’s part of the frontispiece, ready for framing. This is my favourite illustration.
And it genuinely is a delightful, funny book — I gave a copy to my dad for Father’s Day, and he almost cried with laughter, recognising birds and situations.
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On 2 June, I’m giving a silhouette bookplate workshop at the QUT Art Museum! (This is in addition to the artist floor talk on 12 May.)
Developed in response to the current exhibitions ‘Spowers & Syme’ and ‘A Matter of Looking: 20th century works from the QUT Art Collection’, join Kathleen Jennings to explore the principles of silhouette art, cutting techniques, composition and design to create a bookplate in a style of your very own!
Date: Friday 2 June
When: 10AM-12PM
Place: QUT Art Museum
Free, bookings essential, registrations via Eventbrite, link in bio.‘Spowers & Syme’ is a National Gallery Touring Exhibition supported by Visions of Australia, Major Patron David Thomas AM, and the Gordon Darling Foundation. ‘Spowers & Syme’ is a Know My Name project.
Here are some rather better photos, courtesy of the QUT Art Museum, of the illustrations I did for their activity space, to accompany Spowers & Syme (a National Gallery Touring Exhibition), and the companion exhibition from the QUT Art Museum’s collection, A Matter of Looking.
I’ll also be giving an artist floor talk there on 12 May as part of the Brisbane Art & Design festival.
Two new exhibitions have just opened at the QUT Art Museum at QUT Gardens Point, Brisbane (alongside the City botanic gardens) — Spowers & Syme (a National Gallery Touring Exhibition), and the companion exhibition from the QUT Art Museum’s collection, A Matter of Looking.
They are both warm and vivid and generous exhibitions. I highly recommend checking them out, particularly as many of the fragile works in Spowers & Syme — with all their interwar energy — may not be on exhibition again for some time.
And, accordingly, I was thrilled to be asked to design illustrations for the activity space, getting to spend time staring at all these works and distilling them down to a tumble of black-and-white energy. (I love playing in others’ worlds, whether artists or authors, trying to see through their eyes and then again, anew, through my own.)
AND the museum has just announced that they are part of the Brisbane Art & Design festival this May! As part of that, I will be there for an artist floor talk!
Join QUT Galleries and Museums Engagement Officer, Renae Belton in conversation with local illustrator and writer Kathleen Jennings who has been commissioned to design an activity space where people can explore pattern making, drawing and creative play whilst visiting our current exhibitions, ‘Spowers & Syme’ and ‘A Matter of Looking: 20th century works from the QUT Art Collection’.
Date: Friday 12 May
When: 12:30 -1:30PM
Place: QUT Art Museum
Free, bookings essentials, registrations via Eventbrite.
‘Spowers & Syme’ is a National Gallery Touring Exhibition supported by Visions of Australia, Major Patron David Thomas AM, and the Gordon Darling Foundation. ‘Spowers & Syme’ is a Know My Name project.
I had the chance to illustrate the cover for Wildendrem, from Phantom Mill Games, a fantasy campaign setting that is kickstarting now. At the date of this post, there are 20 days left to run in the campaign, which funded fully by its second day
Wildendrem is a land lousy with knights, where the quest is the chief currency, and where the dark dreamings of the ancient world still seep from the shadows. It is a land gone strange: picture a black light Avalon, or the Knights of the Round Table in the grips of a sorcerous hallucination. The Wildendrem style of fantasy adventure is a vibrant combination of high medieval and deep weird.
The subject of this first volume is Gnolune, the Valley of Flowers, one of Wildendrem’s nine provinces. It is a place of decadence and dangerous beauty, in which flower knights roam the meadows in search of challengers, monks make wine to inspire visions of a lost empire, and a sorceress tends to the eons-long birth of a vegetal godling.
You can support the game, pre-order, and perhaps push it into stretch goal territory here: Wildendrem Volume One.
These observation journal pages feature a simple activity: make a small thing, then make notes about making the thing.
The thing I made was a silhouette with imitation gold foil on it — a function of Inktober and Mother Thorn and other silhouette projects and interests at the time.
A few days later, I played with the same ideas again, this time with a gold leafing pen (Krylon).
This time, I was more focussed on a particular question (18k gold leafing pen vs imitation gold leaf) — how they handled and what effects they suggested. (See also: loving the tools.)
Observations (true for me):
See also: Making Little Things; The Tiniest Things; Small Projects and Tiny Unicorns.
These epiphanies are small and frequent. But it’s less important to know them intellectually than to learn them viscerally, and remind myself through my hands.
Writing/Illustration/Creating Activity
(if you keep an observation journal, activities like these are a good way to find some personal fascinations and questions to pursue — they’re also a nice way to just calm down and make things)
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Getting the birds framed for the launch of Darryl Jones’s Curlews on Vulture Street, next Wednesday (14 September 2022) Avid Reader in Brisbane.
I don’t cope well with measuring and cutting rectangles, so a massive shoutout goes to the very efficient Frameshop for saving me (again, as usual).
Darryl Jones’ Curlews on Vulture Street is out this month! He will be in conversation with Christine Jackman at Avid Reader in Brisbane this month, on 14 September 2022 — and for those attending in person the original artwork for my illustrations will be on display (and available!)
Wednesday 14 September 2022
6:30 PM – 7:30 PM
In store at Avid Reader Bookshop / ZOOM Online
Instore Ticket $15.00, Zoom Ticket $5.00
Tickets available until 14 September 2022 4:00 PM
Despite the noise, heat, dust and fumes, the ceaseless movement, light and toxins, many birds successfully live their lives among us. And not just furtively in the shadows. Ibis steal our lunch, brush-turkeys rearrange gardens and magpies chase us from near their nest.
From blackbirds and sparrows in his childhood country town to brush-turkeys in the suburbs, Darryl Jones shares a fascinating story of curiosity, discovery, adventure and conflict, played out in the streets and backyards of Australia. He also provides rare insights into the intimate lives of some of our most beloved and feared, despised and admired neighbours. Magpies, curlews, ibis, lorikeets and cockatoos will never seem the same again.
Darryl Jones is a Professor of Ecology at Griffith University in Brisbane, where he has been investigating the many ways that people and wildlife interact for over 30 years. He is particularly interested in why some species are extremely successful in urban landscapes, while many others are not, and how best to deal with the ensuing conflicts. More recently, he has been trying to understand more about the humans that also live in cities in large numbers, and how they engage with nature. This has led him into the strange and fascinating world of wild bird feeding and has resulted in collaborations with other researchers all over the world. He has published six books, including The Birds at My Table and Feeding the Birds at My Table.
Something wonderful and shining just arrived from Fast Printing!
It’s a set of foil-printed bookplates for book signing, for Angela Slatter.
So shiny!
These hind girls (and Angela’s books) were also the inspiration behind the July calendar:
Here’s a quick glimpse of the process:
The lesson I did learn was probably not to work quite so large for a bookplate again — it took up most of a sheet of A4 paper, and I had to adjust some of the tinier details for printing.
Dancing in the dark…
For comparison, here is the full art, side-by-side with the bookplate. And I am delighted with how it turned out.
Darryl Jones’ memoir of life as an urban ecologist, Curlews on Vulture Street, is now available for pre-order — and there’s currently 20% off for orders placed through the UNSW Bookshop.
The book will be released in September, and there will be an event at Avid Reader on 14 September 2022 — you can book here. There’s a fairly high chance that some of the original art will be there too… more on that soon, but for now, here’s a teaser — one of the illustrations in progress.
Kathleen Jennings 