Alexis Deacon's Blog, page 12

adventuring

When I was small I loved playing choose your own adventure gamebooks.  I rediscovered them in my twenties, vowing this time that I would play them properly and not cheat by keeping my thumb in the previous page and automatically winning every fight.  Curiously, this made for a very different experience.  Instead of living the dream of the all-conquering hero, I found myself playing as a series of characters (I made up a different one each time) who scrabbled around the edge of an adventure before facing an unpleasant and untimely death.  I got really fond of some of these guys (and girls) and was very sad when they passed away.  If anything I think I identified more with them than the heroes I had played as a child.  It's nice to know what happened to some of those skeletons that seem to decorate every dungeon...  If the fantasy universe were the real one I'm pretty sure that would be my fate.

Why did I bring my Bagpipes??
Why must I have such a ridiculous hobby?
Oh, God, another bloody passageway.  East or west - I don't know!
I'm going to die, I know it.  Some pesky goblin's going to jump me and have my guts out.



Entering this tournament and preparing for my almost certain death has taught me one thing: It is a myth that women choose their men as life companions.

Tintin, the encyclopedia of stuff

Have you ever noticed how incredibly useful Tintin is when you need an idea for something?  There's so much information crammed into every book.  I often used to turn to it if I needed to find a design for a face, a posture or a colour scheme...  then I stopped when I realised how many other people were doing it too!

Here's a page of faces from an old sketchbook:




Obelix makes a cameo at the bottom ^-^

a room

I found this description of a room in an old sketchbook and liked it:

The cabin was small, even for a very small person.  The sheets were greasy.  The blankets seemed to be made entirely of hairs.  The hairs were all squashed together but they tried to escape at every opportunity.  They prickled and they scratched.  Above the bed, massive things moved around in pipes.  There was a light.  The light didn't reach the corners.  Things lived in those corners.  If you stayed still they came out and went exploring.  They moved very quickly.  They looked too big to squash.  The floor was red.  Everything else was grey.  Some things had been born grey, some had been painted grey, others had achieved greyness.  A previous occupant had drawn something on the door, with his fingernails possibly.  The subject of the drawing was unknowable.  Beneath the marks was a solid lock of steel.  It was sealed.

Also fits the pattern mentioned in the previous post, I note...

the embarrassing mind

There is something that you notice about yourself when you've had to come up with story ideas for many years.  That is how embarrassingly revealing they are about your psyche.  I get very exasperated about how easy I find it to make up stories about lost, childlike things (or lost children for that matter), about kooky creatures who find acceptance just by being themselves or about magical beings who come and sort everything out for you.  I also do combinations.  Lately, I find the same story has got turned outward.  In Cheese Belongs to You and I am Henry Finch the question seems to be:  what the hell is going on out there anyway??
I guess I'd rather that than find I'd written American Psycho.  I do try and write other kinds of stories but they never work out... I suppose they lack authenticity ^-^.
 

 

Fairyland

here's one I made earlier

Now that I am working on Jim's Lion again there is less stuff to post.  I want most of it to be a surprise... as I'm sure Walker Books do too ^-^ !  I will try and stay regular though.  ahem.   Might just be a bit more random...

Here are some pictures that I made for the Bell X1 album that we won't be using...





Perhaps this image shows what happens to that rabbit in the last post... or why they put him in the hat in the first place!

we're going to need a bigger hat

I drew this panel for Jim's Lion yesterday.  It made me smile.

the bedside toys

The original title for While You Are Sleeping was The Bedside Toys.  That book was inspired by my lifelong love of toys.  At the time I was trying to come up with an idea for my next story and was getting thoroughly distracted by my discovery that underneath the layers of paint on Toy Biz Lord of the Rings figures was a perfect likeness of the actor... It took ages but I scraped the paint off each one and then repainted them myself.  I was so pleased with the result that I used to gang them up on my bedside table.  That was when I remembered how I used to choose a toy to watch over me at night when I was very small and that gave me the idea that eventually became While You Are Sleeping...

 

just remembered - the hobbits had hair made out of brillo pads ^-^!

Still very fond of the Lord of the Rings figures... think my eyes are too knackered for that sort of thing now!

trial by radio

UK based folks may have heard Memory Palace being reviewed on Radio 4 last night.  They were a bit ho hum about it, which was a shame.  They were especially down on those of us who had tried to do nothing more than illustrate the text.  I had hoped that this exhibition would get the discipline of illustration some much needed love...  drawing is my favourite thing in the universe.  I'm always a bit sad when other people don't seem to like it as much!

Before the exhibition opened, Isabel Greenberg and I were interviewed by students at the Royal College of Art for their own radio programme.  They were much nicer to us ^-^.  You can listen to it here.

behind the scenes - part three

The ninth image in the sequence is taken from the middle row.  These images are in comic strip.  They recount the protagonist's interrogation.  In this picture, the last one in the row, he is taken away to be tortured... !

I began drawing everyone in charcoal, scaled so that they would fill the panel.






 I wasn't so keen on how that turned out.  I've noticed that if it is at all possible I tend to omit any contextual information from my drawing (like where the characters actually are!).  I forced myself to scale down the characters and add a little bit of information about the room they are in. 

As usual I started the drawing with the the focal point... no good working for hours only to mess that bit up!






That done, I added the rest of the characters and attempted a couple of staircases and a door.  Got to practise doing that sort of thing more often!





Moving on to the next row, I began with the image on the right then drew the other two.  The right hand one seemed the most likely to go wrong... but it didn't.  Hurray!  I think that little panel is one of my favourite pictures from the whole commission.  Curiously, when I look at it I think of the soccer player Michael Owen discussing his retirement.  That was playing on the radio when I drew it.  I listen to spoken word a lot when I'm drawing and I find that the two things get mingled in my mind so I can't see or hear the one without thinking of the other.  Viv pointed out that this is what they do in A Clockwork Orange!  




Now I had to do the last panel.  The previous lot had gone well so I started to get afraid I would ruin it.  This is never a good place to be when drawing ^-^!  I drew the character of the inquisitor first, thinking him the most important... and sure enough he went wrong, not catastrophically wrong just walking potato wrong.  I contemplated starting the whole thing again but that seemed like going a bit far so I just pressed on anyway and tried to lose him in a bit of a crowd.  




Finally I added the protagonist being dragged away in the background... here's how it turned out in the end:





Actually there is one little thing missing.  In the middle picture the inquisitor is holding a scrap of the periodic table when he asks, do you know what this is?  I almost forgot to add that before the piece went on display.