Wednesday 30 November 2011

Wolf-Speaker WIP

I quite like how this is looking at the moment, so thought I'd post it in case I later screw it up in any way...

Following on from my Alanna picture, it's Veralidaine Sarrasri (Daine) from the next series Tamora Pierce wrote, The Immortals. The series, and the character were always my favourite of Pierce's Tortall stories - possibly simply because I read them first and it is via them I formed my first impression of the world. But Daine does have an awful lot of undeniably awesome moments. Pierce also steers skilfully clear of Mary-Sue-dom despite having a friend-to-all-living-creatures, unknowingly-attractive, awesomely powerful god-child as her protagonist. Daine is endearingly down-to-earth, and often cross and grumpy. This is also the series where Pierce's attention to authentic detail really kicks in. Daine's interactions with animals feel real because Pierce has so thoroughly researched the biology, habits and personalities of the animals she writes about. Apparently Daine first came to Pierce when she was watching a David Attenborough documentary, and the influence of that serious and sharp-eyed attitude to natural history is apparent throughout the series.

What you see so far is a line drawing of brown paper, the skin and hair with an initial layer of acrylic colour. The feathers on her (headdress? Actual head, semi-transformed?) are real feathers. As is evident from previous work, I love working onto brown paper in any case, but somehow brown does seem to be the essential colour I always associate with The Immortals. Perhaps because Daine's magic manifests as copper, perhaps because I associate the colour brown with nature and animals, perhaps simply because the first of the gorgeous covers for the series by David 'awesome' Wyatt is rather brown.

I want to surround her with animals and animal motifs, naturally - maybe some painted but largely found images. Which is difficult as I have not yet found many of the right sort, and at the right size.

Friday 18 November 2011

Alanna! Oops.


Yup, I took precious time away from finishing Christmas Open House stuff to complete my Alanna of Trebond and Olau sketchy.

Tamora Pierce seems to have fallen out of fashion in Britain, and you don't see her stuff about as much as you did when I was a teen. I gather she's still very popular in America - a status she very much deserves. I can't say enough nice things about Tammy P. In a genre full of flat, generic characters and poor Middle Earth-rip-off settings, Tammy has always managed to create books that are full of life and humour and convincing detail. It's not that her stories are necessarily founded on ideas that have never been explored before - in fact, her two first series in particular are founded on almost folkloric bases: the girl who disguises herself as a boy to train for knighthood; the girl who can talk to animals etc.

It's that she fills these stories with characters who you care about - who can be petty and stupid sometimes, and who have fun, and who interact with each other like people really interact. If she's writing about a girl who runs with wolves, you can be sure that Tammy's done her homework and that the behaviour of the animals is based on solid research. As she has set more and more books in Tortall the land and its neighbouring countries have grown in depth and subtlety, and changed with the passage of the books timeline, in the way the best fantasy lands do. There's something of Terry Pratchett about Tammy's world-building. She's another writer who stops to think about how a magic-influened, pseudo-medieval city would actually work.

('The Healing In The Vine', one her none-Tortall books, must be pretty unique amongst fantasy novels, in that the meat of the story is the outbreak of an epidemic in the city, and follows the efforts of the characters to fight the disease and find a cure - it's a drama of research-magic. It's also a great read.)

But back to the point: this is Alanna, star of Tamora Piere's first quartet of novels. Actually, this series came second in my personal Tammy P chart to 'The Immortals' (the one with the talking-to-animals-magic) but that is not to say I didn't read and reread the Alanna stories and still turn to them now for some serious comfort-reading.

I'm happy with the picture, though I weakened and made Alanna look more feminine that I originally intended. I had meant for her to be about age 15 here, and thereby still disguised as a boy. But it works as well to think of this being fully-knighted Alanna, and so openly female. Despite myself, it goes against the grain to make a girl look too boyish. I do the same thing with Maladict/a from Terry Pratchett's 'Monstrous Regiment' - in my head she's androgynous, but she comes out looking no more convincingly male than a twenties flapper: boyish in haircut, but of extremely feminine face and figure.

Sunday 13 November 2011









It's been ages, so I'm going to stick a few photos up of (some of) what I've been up to. Firstly, above, life drawing (painting).

I had a few months when I wasn't doing it regularly, and I've picked it up again now I've moved back to Brighton (here: http://brightondrawing.tumblr.com/) I felt pretty rusty starting back, but I feel I'm getting back into the flow a bit. My favourite at the moment is the blue one cuz of the skellington.

Also this <--

The very first thing I posted on this blog was
a variation on the same theme. Basically, I once drew a large picture, compositing Brighton landmarks which I called 'On A Clear Day You Can See Forever...' (hm, I must update the image on my website with a better quality one).

It was a million-hours (or so) well spent, because I've been deconstructing the image and using various bits of it in various ways ever since.

This <-- and this are where I've cut apart the elements of the drawing and used them to form layers in papercuts set in deep frames. Sounds relatively straightforward, but requires an awful lot of fine craft-knife work, as well as lots of work where you need to fill in gaps that are on show in 3D form, where they weren't in 2d.


In fact I have (just about) done two cut-outs recent based around elements from 'On A Clear Day...' and this is the second:

Actually a good 70-80% of the image is stuff drawn anew for this project. Partly because it's rather larger than previous variations - the biggest cut-out I've ever done. I was lucky in coming across a large deep-set frame. This piece has a theme: Brighton Rock. One of my very, very favourite books, and also a great film/s, Brighton Rock references crop up pretty frequently in my work.

I'm feeling pretty smug with regards to this project so far, I frankly think it looks pretty awesome :)

However I can't work out whether I should leave it monotone and just finish it by adding in more black areas - or colour it. And if so, how? For original 'On A Clear Day...' I was looking at 30s railways posters, and the limited palette of ice-cream colours they employ so effectively. The same palette suits Brighton Rock because of the period, and because it's nicely ironic for the town to be so pastel and innocent, in a way that echoes the novel's lines about 'cream houses like a pale Victorian watercolour...' and so on, that I've quoted within the picture. On the other hand I don't want to retread the same ground, it's boring. So, stumped.

Anyway, what with these, creating cool stuff for our Christmas Open House (pictures to follow, I hopes) and updating my showreel and website, that accounts for the past couple of months' creative output... I might also have a illustration-type-picture to post soon of Alanna from Tamora Pierce's books if I am not successful in keeping my nose to the grindstone of Open House oriented work in the next few days. I started one last night, you see...