The Tallow-Wife arrives!

Look what’s arrived from Tartarus!

It’s Angela Slatter‘s extremely beautiful The Tallow-Wife and Other Tales, which is now available to buy in a limited edition.

(Photo from Tartarus Press)

It is illustrated throughout with vignettes and spot illustrations in the same style as The Bitterwood Bible.

A Staedtler Pigment Liner 0.05, and a Faber Castell Pitt Artist Pen Warm Grey 272, on Canson Illustration paper.

It’s a loose, conversational, first-impressions style that I love working in. It’s so first-impressions that the label for my sketchbook notes for the project became not only the title page, but the spine lettering and the basis for some of the cover ornaments.

First impressions isn’t the same as easy. Here, more than any other style, is where I can feel all the work of observing (the world, how I work, how other people solve problems) and sketching pay off.

I particularly enjoy working this way because it catches that first response of an early reader, the images that intrigue and charm me, the conversation I wanted to have with the stories when I was first exposed to them. And also because, while there’s a lightness to the style, there’s also a lovely weight of quantity — spooling out wavering lines in response to the stories as they unfold, questioning and reacting and correcting.

More commonly, illustrating a book involves reading through, responding, making thumbnail sketches, having those approved, refining pencils, having those approved, and then working on the finals (subject to approval). For The Tallow-Wife, the selection process was simply the appeal of the text (and the limits of my abilities!), and the taste of the author and publisher as they select and place the final collection of drawings.

The Tallow-Wife and Other Tales is a companion book to Sourdough and Other Stories and the World Fantasy Award-winning Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings. The limited edition is now available to buy from Tartarus (while the print-run lasts).

^{If you need reasons to buy this, apart from the obvious (Slatter, Tartarus, enchantments), I have posted An Incomplete List of Reasons I Have Bought Illustrated Books, in case any of those excuses resonate with you.}

The Tallow-Wife: pre-orders open

The Tallow-Wife and Other Tales, the third mosaic collection in Angela Slatter‘s Sourdough world, is now available for preorder from Tartarus Press, in a limited edition hardback.

As with most Tartarus hardbacks, it pays to look under the dust jacket…

And look at the lettering on the spine! I now wish to have all my handwriting printed in foil.

(I wasn’t expecting that part.)

Previous Tallow-Wife art posts:

• Beginning sketches: The Tallow-Wife
• More Tallow-Wife glimpses
• Tallow-Wife stationery in progress

Tallow-Wife stationery in progress

As previously mentioned, I’ve been working on (and have finished!) the illustrations for Angela Slatter‘s collection The Tallow-Wife and other tales, the third book in the Sourdough/Bitterwood Bible (World-Fantasy-Award-winning!) sequence. The book is scheduled to come out from Tartarus Press later this year, and in the meantime Angela and I have been putting together some promotional postcards for when the book comes out.

Previous Tallow-Wife posts are under this tag: The Tallow-Wife.

(These are photos from Angela’s Instagram off her screen — there’ll be clearer shots when it’s all printed!)

When the book comes out (and don’t worry, I’ll let you know!) she’ll be signing these to go out with some copies.

You can see the other images and quotes on her Instagram post.

More Tallow-Wife glimpses

I’ve been having a wonderful time working through Angela Slatter’s The Tallow-Wife and Other Tales (previously mentioned here: Beginning Sketches) to be published by Tartarus (we hope later this year).

It’s the third volume of stories in the world of Sourdough and The Bitterwood Bible, and my job is to sketch through it, drawing and reacting — as a reader and fan, as much as an artist.

I love our approach for these books. It’s a style I have to constantly work towards recreating when I work in a production process that involves thumbnail sketches and pencils and approvals.

These are pure glimpses of gesture and scene, a little lighthearted, frequently grim. Many pages of them.

You can seek more sketches (and an extract from the afterword) over on Angela’s blog: The Tallow-Wife and Other Tales.

Sketches and notes: their purpose

I was going back through photos and found this unused sketch from Kij Johnson’s The River Bank.

This stage of a project is very charming — the snapshots of moments, the hint of movement (or, as here, stillness) and expression. They are usually just notes for myself, but a lot of the work involved in finishing a more formal final illustration is about trying to capture that lightness. (Although when I’m making sketches that will be the final illustrations, there’s a lot of unseen work involved in trying to teach my hand the shapes of what I’ll be drawing).

 

Sketches in progress for Angela Slatter’s The Tallow-Wife

 

Something I’m gradually learning with writing is to treat the early stages in a similar way: quick notes on an aesthetic, lists of “lush language” (per Kim Wilkins), just sketching the best bits (including sketching with words) so that the heart and movement is there.

And if you are looking for a pleasant, gentle, sunlit story, with nothing more nefarious than foxes and stoats, written with a deft touch and a loving eye, I highly recommend The River Bank.

Beginning sketches: The Tallow-Wife

Since Angela Slatter has started posting teasers (instagram.com/angelaslatter), I can let you know about one of my current projects! I am currently sketching my way through her manuscript for The Tallow-Wife and Other Tales, the third volume in the Sourdough and Bitterwood Bible sequence. I also illustrated The Bitterwood Bible (The Bitterwood Bible Cover Art and Illustrations), and if the The Tallow-Wife sounds familiar, it might be because I previously illustrated the title story for a limited-edition chapbook: The Tallow-Wife.

As usual, I started by making a big pile of these little sketch-folds — cutting sheets of nice A3 paper into long strips and folding them with a bone-folder.

I like these mini-sketchbooks for several reasons:

• I can make them of my preferred papers.
• A handful of them will fit in a small pencil case, for working when I’m out-and-about.
• They’re so short there’s no pressure to either fill or not ruin them.
• They make a pleasingly fat little stack as I work through.
• At the end, I can bundle them all up into a single book, and it’s a nicely shaped object that’s impressively long when unfolded.

Here’s a page testing pens, to see which matched best which previous illustrations.

It’s such a pleasure to just draw through these stories as I read them — they are very beautiful, and a chance to revisit a favourite world.

And finally, a long and angry fox.

For more, for now, I recommend following Angela on Instagram or Twitter.

 

The Tallow-Wife

 

A reminder for anyone who is at Conflux in Canberra this weekend: tomorrow (Sunday) at 2.30pm is Angela Slatter’s Guest of Honour speech, after which this very limited edition book from FableCroft publications, set in the World-Fantasy-Award-winning Bitterwood Bible world, will be available for sale, and for signing by Angela and me:

The Tallow-Wife, by Angela Slatter, illustrated by Kathleen Jennings

A limited edition, exclusive hardcover…

Return to the dreaming streets of the cathedral-city of Lodellan, where a new generation of characters face fairy tales and nightmares. Cordelia Parsifal has an enviable life, hard won, but the ghosts of the past are soon to remind her that no sin or omission goes unnoticed.

A darkly mannered narrative of a family facing its downfall, and the hidden secrets within. Deftly told in Slatter’s seemingly effortless prose, “The Tallow-Wife” is unexpected and shocking, with depths to be explored. Paired with vignettes from the same world, and featuring an essay by illustrator Kathleen Jennings.