Alexis Deacon's Blog, page 18

Jitterbug Jam

Here are some of the original costume designs for the family in Jitterbug Jam ...  I always wished more of these had made it into the finished book.

sneak preview

Here is some of the preliminary work I have been doing for the Memory Palace exhibition

as ever - click on the image to see a larger version
 And here is how the commission is shaping up so far

this one will stay small... don't want to give too much away!
 

Saturday Night Loris / Smooth Loris?

When it comes to dancing, sometimes less is more... so says Slow Loris anyway

more Loris raving

When it comes to dancing, sometimes less is more... so says Slow Loris anyway

Its

In the interview for the Lightbox Gallery I talked about the problem of illustrating something that has been very carefully described.  This is how It, the Sand Fairy or Psammead, is introduced in Five Children and It:


  The children stood round the hole in a ring, looking at the creature they had found. It was worth looking at. Its eyes were on long horns like a snail's eyes, and it could move them in and out like telescopes; it had ears like a bat's ears, and its tubby body was shaped like a spider's and covered with thick soft fur; its legs and arms were furry too, and it had hands and feet like a monkey's...

  The Sand-fairy smoothed his long rat-like whiskers and smiled between them. 


I suspect that this description is so full of specifics that it ceases to be fun for the reader to imagine and starts to become obstructive to the narrative.  If you have to try and remember all that every time the Psammead pops up in the story, it is hard to concentrate on anything else!  This is a nice opportunity for an illustrator to help out... but of course the illustrator has to make sure they do give their Psammead ALL of the features described.  You know some readers are  going to be checking!  That is exactly the sort of thing I used to do when I was a child ^-^

Even a close description like that does allow lots of room for interpretation though:

















What would your Psammead look like?

the light of day

I seem to do a lot of work that ends up just sitting in a box in the dark somewhere.  I guess that is inevitable.  It's nice to drag it out into the light occasionally though!

Here are some drawings I did for covers to Five Children and It and The Railway Children.  The projects didn't work out in the end but I kind of like the drawings.  Edwardian children wore stuff that is great fun to draw!


 


 

Lightbox interview

Just found an interview I did for the Lightbox Gallery in Woking.  Can't believe how much I say the same things over and over!  Must try and change the record... Still I can't but agree with myself ^-^

Slow Loris disco

Here is an unused dance sequence from Slow Loris.  When the text says, Loris got up and did things until he was so tired he couldn't do another thing, this is what he was originally meant to be doing... never did understand why it got cut.  He doesn't really get to strut his stuff anywhere else!

procrastination

I am supposed to be doing my accounts so now seemed like the perfect time to start the blog I've been meaning to begin for the last six years.

There is plenty going on too:  Cheese Belongs to You is out and so is The Sleepwalkers (which I co-created with Viv... although she did all the actual work!) also Croc and Bird is out in paperback next month.

At home I am working on two projects: a part comic strip version of Jim's Lion by Russell Hoban and a sequence of images for the Memory Palace exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

I will post pictures of work in progress for both of those.  I promise they will be spoiler free!  I will also try and use the blog to show pictures from some of the unpublished work that I have made over the years.  There are so many things that I have drawn or written that never made it into a book but that I would still love to be able to show!

In the meantime here are some battle beasts that my students made during a week's workshop at the Visual Arts School in Reykjavik: