Alexis Deacon's Blog, page 11

last lion lap

I finished the penultimate dream sequence for Jim's Lion this week.  There will be five illustrated dreams in the book... now I've done four of them!


roar !

perspective boost

A little while ago I blogged that I was trying to improve my grasp of perspective in drawing.  Since then I have been working at it a fair bit and I can feel it starting to sink in.  I had never realised in the past how useful it could be to to make you believe that everything in an image is in the same physical space.  I have been trying to practise in my free time on journeys and such like.   I can seldom draw with a steady line as the bus or train will be jiggling away like a good 'un.  The joy of it is that doesn't seem to matter.  I think these pictures, whether composed solely of figures or figures in a landscape, feel like they are happening somewhere.  That is a really exciting development for me because for the longest time I have wanted to be able to make stories full of all kinds of places... I just had no clue how to draw them.

arrivals

Hot on the heels of The Selfish Giant the limited edition Bell X1 Chopping Board Edition arrived today...


I'll have to remember to take the cd out before I put it in the washing up ^-^





The disc itself looks really nice!  I must make a mental note that brush drawings seem to survive reproduction much better than pencil ones!




And then the new Loaf arrived on the same day:



They have done a brilliant job with the printing.  It is totally possible to read every word in mine, which was a worry because the writing was always going to be tiny...



Here are some glimpses of other stories in this issue: By Becky Palmer...



 Viviane Schwarz:


And Robert Bidder:

MONstaz

I did some illustrations for the Awfully Bad Guide to Monster Housekeeping to raise money for the Ministry of Stories ... The idea was that children would come up with the text for the book in story workshops at the Ministry and what they made would be professionally printed, edited, designed and illustrated.  Neat for them... I would have LOVED that when I was small.  Anyway it made for some mighty strange monsters.   The ones I had to draw were described in great detail.  'Twas a hard job to fit all the monster features in!




those red blobs are the monster's thoughts floating loose around his head

nothing for tea

I found this in an old sketchbook and thought it oddly suited to the blog page format...

learning on the job

For some time now I have been aware that my use of the photocopier to separate my artwork into a linework stage and a colouring stage was limiting what I could achieve.  In The Selfish Giant, I knew that colour would play an important part in telling the story; what with the changing seasons and the multitudes of children (who I thought needed to appear as bright and varied as the flowers the narrative links them to).  In early tests I found that the photocopier was leaving so much grey on the page that it was impossible to make anything bright at all.

As I had done with While You Are Sleeping, I tried to develop a new method that would be more apt to the story.  This one would involve using a range of coloured lines, the line colour being determined by the painted colour underneath...






Ultimately I wasn't able to make it work and only a few pictures done this way made it into the book.  I really struggled to get things right first time and ended up redoing artwork again and again and again, which is almost always guaranteed to sap all energy from it.  I also found it really hard to get a mark-making method that worked for both the giant and the children in the same spread.  For every picture you see in the published book there are about five other failed versions sitting in my cupboard!  I'm glad I tried though. By the time I had finished working on the book I had finally begun to develop colour processes that felt more like my own (my earlier post making shapes talks about one).  

I think the first thing they told us in art college was, if you don't take a risk, you'll never learn anything new,  which is all very well but there's a lot of falling on your face inbetween times.

further adventuring

Another thing I discovered replaying fantasy gamebooks was that they are great to improvise comics to! Here is a section from the first one I tried:  The Warlock of Firetop Mountain
 











If anyone actually reads this, let me know!  I'm pretty sure I've got more of it in a sketchbook somewhere.

puzzling

Memory is a strange thing.  I could have sworn the poster for the film Labyrinth had an insanely wiggly maze going on forever behind David Bowie.  Can't seem to find it online though...

Anyhow, the version I thought I saw was the inspiration for this Jim's Lion panel I drew today.  Now I'm sort of hoping it only ever existed in my mind!

always wanted to do this

This footage was taken for the documentary on Memory Palace but didn't make the final cut... 

one day the giant came back

Selfish Giant copies arrived at Random House!  I got one yesterday... ^-^