Show your workings

It’s now only three weeks until Mansfield and Me is officially published, and I thought I’d show some of my workings – the drawings I did to get to the drawings I made for my actual book. It was easy to write my own story, as I remembered it all (although of course memory is very unreliable!) For Katherine’s story, I had to do extensive research, and one of my favourite ways to get inside her head was by reading her letters and journals and then drawing pictures based on them. Part of this drawing is based on this letter. 

Katherine manifests the food and weight anxiety that we imagine to belong to our era alone – she was a plump child, and her mother drew attention to the fact, and then she was obsessed with food thanks to her TB-related weight loss.

These drawings are all done quickly, with a bit of paint splashed on top of them, and messy handwriting. Can you read what she says in that last panel? “I don’t feel right unless I can play on my bones.” I always have this sense of loss doing a good copy – the first draft has a looseness and lack of self-consciousness that the final drawing never has. On the plus side, you can read my handwriting in the second draft – or at least I hope you can.

Oh, and this sequence never made it into my book! Comics take up so much room and I had to set aside a lot of material.