Illustration Process: Composition Troubles

The illustration work towards In the Sounds and Seas: Volume 2 has gone remarkably smoothly--so smoothly, in fact, I've hardly given myself the time to write about it here. While each page of V1 felt labored in some way, burdened with making decisions of style and format that would affect the content of the rest of the project, I was able to jump into production of V2 with delightfully little friction. No composition struggles, no clogged pens, and no worries over how to draw hundreds of tiny bunnies. Wonderful!

That was the story, at least, until last week. The action so far in V2 revolves around the character who was revealed at the end of V1, walking through the coastal village, through the woods and to her home/workshop. The rest of the chapter takes place in the workshop and hints at the plans she is making that will carry her through the rest of the story, all of which revolves around the boat she is building.

In the chaos that had grown in my studio prepping and shipping etsy holiday orders, I had lost track of the composition mock-up I built to guide me through this book. Given my good fortune thus far I confidently started illustrating anyway:

And I abandoned it here. The action of walking toward the door of the workshop is not very important and doesn't need to take up more than half the page. The function of this spread is the reveal of the boat: the boat is central to the action of the remaining 5 chapters, and if I'd kept this composition the boat would have been a footnote on the bottom third of the page. No good! So I started over:

With this do-over, I minimized the action of entering the house, and intended to reveal the layout of the house and dramatically introduce the boat in construction in the bottom panel. As I inked the page, I grew less and less satisfied with the composition. Each spread that I have completed so far feels exciting and well made, and this one falls flat. The action of entering the house is still primary, the angle in the bottom panel reads a little forced, and as soon as I started filling in the long panel of water in the middle I realized it was lazy filler. Further, the boat is still not emphasized as the important information on the page: in many ways the boat is the primary character of the series, and this composition doesn't convey that at all.  I abandoned this page as well.

Frustrated at having spent so many hours drawing and inking pages that will not make it into the book, I spent a full day drawing spread composition after composition in miniature to try to work out the best way to tell the story these pages needed to tell. In doing that exercise, I realized that I was trying to accomplish too much, too literally, and in too little space. The whole workshop doesn't have to be laid out dollhouse-style; the important reveal is the boat. So I started again:

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Success! I still want to do some more work on the light/dark balance on the recto page, but what a relief to be able to move on. After two weeks of sketching and penciling and inking and failing, I am very happy with this spread. Keep your fingers crossed that I get back to my old rhythm, and move forward quickly and well. Time's ticking toward my mid-March completion deadline!

Embodied Research

With the first pacing mock-up of Chapter 2 of In the Sounds and Seas almost completed and a long quiet fall and winter ahead of me to draw, I thought now might be a good time to write about process and progress.

I faced a different set of challenges in composing the pages for Chapter 2 than I did in Chapter 1. For starters, I had already illustrated some of the more challenging sequences in Ch1 in previous projects, so the visual language was familiar and many of the "how the hell do I draw this?" problems had already been worked through. Ch2 is brand new in that regard. I benefit from knowing how I best work on these drawing projects (in quiet, with hours set aside and a cup of tea), and from knowing the overall aesthetic of the book, but the rest is just new.

Not only that, but the action in the book is foreign to me. The primary event in Ch2-3 is the building of a large sail boat, and the bulk of the rest of the story after that occurs on the ship. I knew that fudging the details in this chapter would be a huge disaster if I realized down the line that, say, a ship of X model couldn't hold the 3 crew I need it to house. Even worse was the realization that if I illustrated the construction of a boat incorrectly, anyone who had actually built (or, for that matter, sailed) a boat would laugh at the sequence with disdain. The story would hold up, but distractingly incorrect details could ruin the experience for some readers.

The first thing I did was read...a LOT. I've spent the summer reading sailing narratives in historical nonfiction and online, pouring over "How to Sail" guides at breakfast, practicing knots, and delighting in Sailing Alone Around the World, Joshua Slocum's autobiography.

Late summer I took a sailing lesson and learned a lot, having only before ever been on large tour-boat cruises on Lake Michigan. I learned how hard it was to pull up the main sail; I learned how severely a boat can (and should) keel; I learned that I get really, really sea sick.

Taking the lesson that doing something once is just as if not more helpful to me than reading how-to guides, I kept my eyes open and searched actively for any news about folks building or restoring sail boats or ships in the Chicago area, that I might be able to help out and learn some tricks. No such luck. Instead, I'm building a model ship!

This will be a model of Mr Slocum's gaff-rigged sloop, The Spray. I couldn't be more excited about it! In the end, I will have hands-on experience with at least some of the problems one would face when building a ship (and I will have my other resources to fill in the gaps), and I'll have a pretty great model from which to draw.

For now, back to steaming the wood and planking the ship!

Printing the Cover

Linoleum block relief carvings for both the cover pattern and text

The first color: half and half black and sliver ink for a muted-metalic grey, on French's Dur-o-tone Steel Grey paper

First color printed...and look at what's on the wall! Way to go!

(Many thanks to Evanston Print & Paper for accomodating our last-minute press needs.)

Metalic silver ink for a popping title

The first trimmed-down mock-up of the cover of In the Sounds and Seas (vol. 1 of 6).

This afternoon I drop off the cover stock to Salsedo Press, who is offset printing the text block of the book and folding/coallating the press pages. For the first time in 6 months, this project will be out of my hands. I reckon that means it's time to get started on volume 2 this weekend!

On the beginnings of an idea

"I was going up in the elevator and just between the first and second floors, I felt that I was going to vomit up a little rabbit. I have never described this to you before, not so much, I don't think, from lack of truthfulness as that, just naturally, one is not going to explain to people at large that from time to time one vomits up a bunny." 

- Julio Cortazar, Letter to a Young Lady in Paris

Cortazar's short story Letter to a Young Lady in Paris is written in the form of a letter by a young man to his landlord, a friend who let him stay in her apartment in Buenos Aires while she is travelling abroad. The above quote is the first reveal of his problem: one day he finds himself inexplicably and uncontrollably vomiting little bunnies. It is not a shock or a real concern--the narrator is amusingly undisturbed by the physicality of the ordeal--but the rabbits (who continue to be disgorged, and then multiply as rabbits famously do) begin to take over his life and overrun the apartment. They nibble on the corners of books, hide amongst the clothes in the wardrobe, and emotionally more than physically overwhelm him. The perfect tidiness and order of his rented apartment is constantly infringed upon by the rabbits. The story is revealed to be a suicide note: he cannot take responsibility for the creative disorder he released upon the closed space, so he kills himself.

I first read this story in college in a class on literature of the Southern Cone. I took the class as an excuse to walk around Borges's world for credit (labyrinths and impossible dictionaries! infinite libraries and hilarious meta-literary puzzles!) and to polish up my Spanish comprehension. To test myself one day, I took my week's assignment (the above Cortez story) to a coffee shop without a Spanish-English dictionary and read it through. When I first came across the phrase "vomitar conejitas," I cursed my over-confidence: surely the phrase wasn't "vomiting little bunnies?!"

Maybe it is because I read and re-read the story several times that afternoon, and read it so closely, that it has stayed with me all these years later. Maybe I was--as I predictably am--drawn to tongue-in-cheek magical realism, fantastical or disgusting situations treated like the every day. More likely, I recognized a kindred connection to the narrator. His innocuous, purposeless creation, constant and growing, taking over even the dustiest corners of his otherwise orderly space, felt familiar to me as a person who desires order but easily disappears into (occasionally unmanageable) creative production. Producing one thing is the snowball that grows into an avalanche; a project that at first can seem contained and manageable grows and cascades into a multitudinous idea, which can feel exciting and suffocating and liberating. First there are two bunnies, and then my house is overrun.

Four years ago, musing on this story, I painted a portrait of myself vomiting moths.

I approached this project as a technical exercise to try a few painting techniques I'd learned the year before, but making the metaphor literal was really funny to me. It remains one of my favorite projects from that period when I was thrashing around, searching for the right medium and venue to make my work.

Two years ago, after intensively making little books that were witty but emotionally distant from smug self-referentially, I wanted to challenge myself to make a Thing That Rings True. I returned to this image, to this idea, and mapped onto it my interest in thinking about storytelling in and of itself. How much can we really share of ourselves through narration? What is revealed and lost, what is built? I drew a draft of three storytellers, vomiting / singing different tones, that weave together to build a space where I had planned to tell a larger story. The project ended with these three panels.

And so here I am again, back at this idea, taking it to its completion. The book I am working on is about vomiting bunnies. It is about unreliable origins, about obsessive production, about giving everything to a vision, to a creative project, and what happens when that fails. 

And the ocean.

And fire.

Disappointment and Foreward Movement

I had been saving my new pages to share until after the first chapter is finished; I'm still 3 spreads shy, and still short of finishing the first chapter by my original End Of March deadline, but I'm impatient. Here are the fruits of my labor! Note: If you follow the slideshow to the flickr group, you can see higher resolution images.

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.