Well if you’re in Melbourne you’ve suffered through another hot and sticky week but all is mended this weekend. The weather is gentle, the skies clear and there’s a market on tomorrow at the Convent, if you feel so inclined.
I’ve had a big week of work up in my hot studio. On Thursday I created a font for the first time. I hope it works. And, joy and rapture, I finished a picture book. It’s a sweet book about a family and their love for wearing their gumboots all through the seasons of the year. Or perhaps a coded treatise on post-sandalian hedonism… but 
probably not. It’s called “My Boots In Season” written by Kerryn Pascoe and will be published by Windy Hollow Books later this year. I thought it was done so many times over but I kept finding little things I wanted to fix – like looking at one of my characters and suddenly finding I’d created a mini-he. He was only two-thirds the size he was supposed to be! This is why it is good to have a little time to look back over a book before handing it in. It’s amazing the things I can not notice until all the pages are before me and I can compare heights, clothes, hair lengths, colours…
I’ve been using the light box too and so have been completely ringed by things – sitting in a nest of tables, tea trolleys spilling over with roughs and reference, A3 sheets, watercolour pans, inkpots, and pots of pens and brushes. And in the hot room, with an old rattly fan struggling to move the air about and making the papers flap and dance… from above it would have seemed that a strangely artistic twister was slowly devouring the room.
But now the book is done, and I am slowly allowing everything to sidle back into their right places. And I can move again.
I can’t wait to get out to the market and do some big painting on Sunday.
2 Comments
do you ever digitally tweak, Elise, or is it hand-done all the way?
Bit of both really. If the texture and line quality has to be consistent and it’s a big fix I’ll be old fashioned and redo, patch-up or do an alternate bit to be placed digitally later. But for little fixings like errant lines, shifting an element a little against a white background… easy things – I’ll use photoshop on the hi-res scans. How about you? I do like not having liquid paper or bits of paper stuck onto the final art
I don’t think people realise how messy artwork can be sometimes! Especially before computers.