1. The Bower
Today’s illustration inspiration comes from a line, a long line, of one of the best books I read in 2020, Max Porter’s Lanny. A poetically written story about a unique little boy who goes missing, where every line written is a magical little nugget in itself. The book is split into three different sections, each with a slightly different style and perspective and draws on small town gossip, English folklore, and magical realism.
The Line.
The line I have chosen, and a moment that is most memorable to me, comes near the end of the story where in a hard-to-explain-magical-state (?) Lanny’s mum observes him living out his day in his self-constructed bower in the woods (here’s a bowerbird’s nest for reference). I have made bold the parts I wanted to capture in my illustration;
“In comes the sound of her child, singing, Lanny’s strange half-song half-hum chit-chat, and he is among them, in his school shorts and a T-shirt, pottering, planning, darting about, delicate and focused, laying a few early markers, clearing the ground, drawing the perimeter with a stick, off again, back with a bundle, off again, like a time-lapse nature video, she sees him a thousand times a second, her little winged thing, attending to his creation, flickering sun-up sun-down, days layered upon patient days, and she realises their life at home, his time at school, what she thought of as his real existence, was only a place he visited.”
Lanny’s mother is the heroine of the whole book for me, and the observations of her sons often unseen little quirks are just glorious.
So, I had my written line. Time to draw some wobbly ones.
The Wobbly Lines (Sketches).
Firstly, I jotted down all the tasks that Lanny was doing whilst in his bower, these are the things in bold above.
Then, I got to work sketching them out with a graphite pencil into my sketchbook. Lots and lots of Lannys. If you are in any way creative or have had a great idea in your head before you actively try to realise it IRL, you’ll know the sketch or the idea is always better than the final thing. I’m sad about this every time so instead of attempting to redraw my Lanny's again onto fancier paper, I opted to use my exact sketchbook scribbles and scanned them to my laptop.
Sketchbook Lannys
I digitise my sketches for two reasons, 1) to increase/decrease the size and also the contrast in order to make using a lightbox easier and 2) as I use a lot of water and paint in a heavy-handed way that exfoliates paper I don’t like to risk ruining my sketches underneath. By immortalising them onto my laptop (or until the next Mac update destroys my hard drive) I can print and reprint them whenever I like (also it’s nice to show sketches in your portfolio).
Pssst! You might notice the sketched deer and the woman with a map aren’t in the chosen written line - they are included in the pages that follow but I decided against using them in the final composition.
Scanned sketches
Scanned sketches
The Messy Bit (Painting).
Before I got a big piece of ‘final’ paper out, I did a paint wash onto some other paper and tested out black ink line work. There was no real logic to this really, except for playing around and warming up my brain and hands. I never truly know what I’m about to paint and how it will look but I do know the feeling that I’m going for. And for this painting it was the juxtaposition of dynamic movement in a calm, happy space. Here are some ways I tried to achieve that…
For movement;
Overlapping lines and undefined surroundings
Using a lightbox to trace my original wobbly sketches
Line work in liquid graphite to add more texture/less definition
Drawing line work with a clementine stalk (the joy of using nature for a piece so heavily influenced by nature, glorious)
Lots of texture from mixed media; watercolour layers, gouache, acrylic gouache, pencil, crayon, probably other random things on my desk...
Texture building
For calm tone;
Bright colours in the sky
Minimal facial expressions; mixture of happy, playful and neutral
Relaxed/engaged body positions
Adding the sky (& a messy lamplit desk in winter time)
Final thoughts.
The final illustration
When I first completed this, I wasn’t ecstatic. I felt the image in my head hadn’t been wholly realised so I felt a little deflated. Happy overall, but like I could have pushed certain parts more. On reflection, I really like it. The initial feelings have faded and I’m so glad I’ve taken the time to relook at it and understand my process.
Final illustration close-up
I hope you enjoyed getting a little insight into my wobbly process. Please do let me know if you liked it, and if you’d like to see more on my process in the future. Until next time,
Big love, JB x
