The making of a book cover
The guilt overcame me and I started on my book cover (see yesterday’s post). I’m not the kind of designer that can come up with one image and work on it until it is perfect. I have to create multiple images. Then I get myself into a stew because I can’t decide which one I like best. So I thought that I would share my process and use my cringe gauge to decide which ones I hate and which ones I like. Usually this gauge doesn’t kick in until I’ve released stuff into the public.
I started off at the beginning of December, assembling a number of images that I thought might suit the cover. Some of them were abstract, some were illustrative, some were photographic. We got rid of all the abstract art and photography and we decided on a colour palate (greens, reds and blues) and a style – more figurative than abstract – an illustration. Then I started drawing stuff in my sketch book. The one on the top left is inspired by an Amanda Blake illustration so I don’t think I can use it but I felt like I needed to draw my version of it so that some of her amazing painting abilities might rub off on me:
After that I switched to watercolour paper. I tried illustrating scenes from the title story in various degrees of realistic and metaphorical states.
A
My next stage will be deciding which images I think work best as a cover, and applying type. I quite often do hand-drawn type but this time I think I’ll stick to computer-generated type. Something serif.
Do you have a favourite? I think mine is the top watercolour, the one of the two women in formal dress submerged in water. But it’s not entirely up to me.
Happy new year!
Do you have any resolutions? I am quite unresolved this year, apart from my long-standing ‘eat less, exercise more’ one. I do have things I have to get finished – the illustrations for my novel, The Fall of Light, which I need to complete by April, the cover for Emma Martin’s forthcoming book, some comics for an exhibition and for a book. I also have my new book to start and I’m reading Antony Alpers’ The Life of Katherine Mansfield in preparation. But I’m not sure if to-do lists are the same thing as New Year’s Resolutions.
In the mean time, while I’m feeling too summery and languid to write comics, I thought I’d post my last month’s Metro comic, as the latest Metro is now on the new stands for you to buy, or flick through while you’re waiting in the supermarket queue. Click on it and you’ll find an even bigger size for easy reading. Oh, and if you have any resolutions you’d like to suggest – perhaps the kinds of comics you’d like to see more of – please leave a comment!
Not quite Meeting Morrissey
The Wellington Morrissey concert was brilliant. Morrissey sang lots of Smiths songs that I never thought I would hear live. I was beside myself at How soon is now, Still Ill and I know it’s over. Actually, a very important thought that I had in the plane which I forgot to draw was that I thought ‘I can die now and go down singing To die by your side, the pleasure the privilege is mine‘. I am quite nervous about flying.
If any of you have managed to get the latest Metro magazine you would have seen that I was quite nervous about revisiting the past. The 1991 Morrissey concert goes down in my personal hall of best lifetime experiences. But this time I was not disappointed in the slightest. I am still so very happy. And we had a beautiful weekend, as documented by Helen.
Return of the icons
I have been painting more famous people on demand. I suppose I’d better get into practice because next year I’m going to be doing my Katherine Mansfield graphic novel at the Michael King Writers’ Centre. You can read an interview of me here. I am freaking out a little at the magnitude of the task. How will I get it right? There are many people out there who are experts and/or academics, but I am neither of those – I’m a fan who can draw.
I’m still figuring out how I will do this book. I just read Mary and Bryan Talbot’s Dotter of her Father’s Eyes, which is a bio of James Joyce’s daughter Lucia, framed by a personal history of Mary’s relationship with her father. The story lines were differentiated through colour – sepia for the past, full colour for the present. Lucia’s story was fascinating – she was a creative woman who was institutionalised because she refused to give up her dancing – or so this book leads me to believe. It makes me grateful that I am living now. And Mary Talbot had a personal connection – her father was an eminent Joyce scholar, and he was obsessive, tyrannical and occasionally charming.
What’s my personal connection? My paternal grandmother lived down the hill from the Beauchamps in Karori, and I have a collection of Mansfield’s short stories once owned by my maternal grandmother. She played the cello and wrote short stories and so did I – but not nearly so well. I’ve been to her birthplace and I spent summer holidays in Eastbourne, just around from Days Bay, where ‘At the Bay’ was set. I’m fascinated by her, but I’ve only read her stories, not her biographies or her letters and diaries. I will. I am looking forward to it.
These are a few of my Favourite Things
A few months ago, Emma asked me to make a book for her husband Tom for his birthday present. I’ve never met Tom, but Emma sneakily quizzed him about his favourite things and then sent me some links to her flickr photo stream. I approve Tom’s favourite things. I like doing a lot of that stuff myself, even though I’ve never given much thought to the zombie apocalypse.
And in other news, I am STILL working with my editor on my book, and my latest Metro comic is now on the newsstands – the one with Morrissey in it! Of course my fantasy is that Morrissey will see it and get in touch and I will invite him over for dinner. Then he’ll be terribly disappointed in how dull-witted I am, and I will be taken aback by how different he is from the Morrissey I constructed in my head… but perhaps we’ll get on famously and he’ll invite me to his apartment in Rome and lend me his vespa so I can go touring the country side with my sketchbook.
Praying Mantis Attack!
I didn’t really leave my cardigan at the dairy. I wouldn’t do a thing like that. Nor did I ride there without wearing my bicycle helmet. I have a cute bicycle helmet – it’s got flowers on it. But I figured that this was a comic, and I was allowed to bend reality a little. I did get a praying mantis stuck up my sleeve and I scratched it to pieces. It was gross, and now I am a little nervous whenever I put on a shoe or an item of clothing that I haven’t worn in a while. I just tried on a cardigan yesterday and there was a snail up my sleeve. That’s what reminded me of the praying mantis. And the mantis reminds me of the time that I leaned up against a hedge and a stick insect wiggled its way down the back of my shirt…
Lost Children’s Books
A few years ago I used to tell my children a serial over cereal about Matilda. In the story she was their godmother and owned a little monkey called Chuckles and a magic umbrella, and she’d take the boys on adventures. She was a cross between Isabella Blow and Mary Poppins. She was probably too much like them to be truly original, but it’s always good to have a model when you’re building stories on the fly.
Matilda took the boys lots of places in her magic umbrella – they went to Cairo and to Rome. Chuckles was a little kleptomaniac with a penchant for purple, so he was always getting them into trouble, whipping off with the Pope’s ring and sacred cats in Egyptian temples. The story would always involve some kind of feast because somebody once told me that food was an essential ingredient in children’s stories, kind of like sex was in adult novels.
I found all these pictures the other day when I was searching for a missing disk. I think I had some kind of Ottoline book in mind, or perhaps a comic book for kids, in which I got to indulge all my travel and fabulous clothing fantasies. I even wrote a draft for one of the stories I told. But I never did anything with it. There are all these stories that just slip through my fingers.
The other night I watched The September Issue, about Anna Wintour and her master stylist Grace Coddington. It was fascinating to watch all the glorious images that Grace produced, and then to see Anna come and edit them down, removing what Grace felt were her best shots. Still, after so many years in the industry, Grace was devastated to have her work scratched out like that. And Anna was decisive and unsentimental in her image selection. It was fun to watch Grace construct her sets – she was inventing a fantasy on an epic scale, with photoshoots in Versailles and Rome, $50k a shot. I watched it with great interest, because my novel is a lot about creating stuff and then having to relinquish the things that you’ve made. I’m not very good at letting go. That’s why I’ve dug up these pictures and posted them on the internet. I should learn to throw things away – but obviously even the most successful have trouble doing so.
Morrissey!
This is the first panel of my comic for the next Metro magazine, all about Morrissey coming to New Zealand in December. There are nine more panels to the comic, so you’ll have to check it out when it’s in the shops in a few weeks time. I am super-excited about Morrissey coming here for the first time in 21 years. 21 seems like an appropriate number – at 18 I was at the height of my crazed fandom, and I would’ve martyred myself for Morrissey. 21 years on, I’m far more mature in my devotion, and I probably won’t throw myself on the bonnet of his limo or hunt down his hotel, like I did last time round. But still, I’m looking forward to it, and I even had a dream about it last night, where I went to the concert and was disappointed that Morrissey didn’t speak to us. I don’t think he ever does.
Right now I’m in the midst of working on my novel with an editor. I keep on thinking that I should write a comic about it, but right now I’m ridiculously busy. But I will be back soon, I promise!
Clueless, part 15
This is part of a series: you can read the last installment here or you can start in the April archives.
I am conscious that there may be medical people out there reading this and I probably have stuff wrong. It was 9 years ago, and this is what I remember. There was a lot of detail that I had to leave out to tell the story in comic form, and probably some detail that I should have left out. I’m not sure if I’m going to continue this story on my blog, or whether I might put it aside for a while to revise and expand. I still haven’t told you what happened with my novel manuscript. If you’re desperate to find out what happens next in the birthing suite, the first story in my anthology, ‘Coming Up Roses’, is pretty autobiographical. It looks like you can buy it on Amazon too.
Oh, and if you were wondering what the song I was singing was, it’s this:
While I was giving birth to Gus, I had ‘Yellow Submarine’ as an earworm. And for Violet, it was Renee-Louise Carafice’s ‘House on Fire.’ Gus’s birth was the easiest, suffice to say.
Portent
I’m always looking for patterns. I feel like I’m playing a constant game of Memory, trying to turn up the card that will match the first one. Sometimes I think it’s my narrative impulse that is scouting for metaphors, hooks to hang my stories on. But maybe it’s just a general human impulse. For instance, Violet’s creche teacher, the one who is a Christian, told me that Violet is always picking flowers and bringing them in to her. ‘Isn’t it amazing, the colours that God makes? It’s so great that Violet sees that,’ she said. Whereas I thought it was because we have a flower garden at home, and she’s always pulling the heads off my freshly-hatched poppies, so it’s only natural she does that at creche too.
Why am I always trying to imbue meaning into everything? Why does Violet turn the animals into little families, scolding the children when they don’t sit up at the table, and insisting that the tiny giraffes scrub their teeth? Sometimes I wish I could just take the world at face value – then I’d feel far less anxious. But also I think I quite like feeling like I’m in the middle of an art house movie – that everything around me is symbolic, and that soon the soundtrack will kick in and I’ll realise that something wonderful – or terrifying – is about to happen.
LET ME BE FRANK 