Bloody Australia Day

Ok, before any of you patriots get yourselves into a lather, I'm not bagging Australia Day. It's just that ours was bloody - literally. Big Squid was engaged in the traditional Aussie ritual of preparing meat for the barbie, when he knocked the chef's knife off the bench and attempted to stop it... with his arm. One ambulance ride, six stitches, a tied-off vein and a tetanus shot later, the Big Squid is fine - but it was pretty scary.

Some hours later, when we'd both recovered from all the excitement, Nurse Bug had a chance to read the lovely review of The Great Gatsby that came out in The Weekend Australian that same day. This is actually the first time the book has been reviewed in a newspaper. It has featured in quite a number of newspaper articles, and has been reviewed in lit/publishing mags, but this was the first newspaper review, and I was thrilled with it. It gladdened my scribbler's heart even more to see that the critic (Cefn Ridout - a comics specialist, I think) didn't start with the "graphic novels - now here's a novelty!" approach, but got straight down to a serious, in-depth review of the particular book. He also looked at Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese, and gave it a glowing rap too. Very happy indeed. Aha - and here's the review online.

In amongst all this I've been hard at work on those backgrounds for Hamlet, which of course are spiralling into ever-increasing levels of detail. Here's the second one:
Big Squid provided very helpful technical input for this picture. In fact, he caught me just in time before I ended up painting helical ice-stairs that were physically impossible. He pointed out that if I wanted them to look as they do, they had to actually be double rather than single helices.

He's a whiz, my Squid. And to celebrate his near miss, we went to see the most appropriate film on offer at our lovely local cinema: Sweeney Todd. Happy bloody Australia Day!

Treat 'em mean, keep 'em keen

No, this isn't a little foray into relationship advice. It's an succinct summing up of the Art Supplies Situation at the moment. Seems that every art gear shop in Melbourne has ceased to stock two of my three favourite products, and most can't even order the stuff in. Naturally this minxlike coyness has me in a towering frenzy of desire for said products.

Magic Color inks, the subject of my ravings last week, are unavailable in Melbourne. I learned this on Monday. Most places have never even heard of them. Fortunately a good substitute does exist - Daler Rowney's "FW" brand of opaque acrylic inks - but they are expensive, and I suspect they may have a greater tendency to clot. Amazingly, despite the obvious wonderfulness of this medium, very few shops stock any opaque acrylic inks at all. Eckersleys (ah, Eckersleys!) in Melbourne is an exception.

Perhaps even more puzzling is the disappearance of Winsor & Newton's "Lana" range of drawing cartridge paper (which is actually no longer called Lana, apparently). You cannot get it anywhere - though once again Eckersley's came through and were at least able to order it for me (though with a wait time of one month!). I am especially keen on their big A3 pads of 220 gsm smoooooth paper. But not only is it unavailable, most shops do not even stock an equivalent product. This is astounding. What do you draw and paint on when you want lovely smooth (but not shiny) creamy paper that is heavy enough to support wet media? What?? The closest thing I could find was a series of bristol-type pads, marketed as "Manga drawing pads". Need I say more...

I know that my relationship with W&N's Lana is a special one, because it survived a terrible betrayal last year. I was on the home stretch of The Great Gatsby. After five years of Lana and I working away together without any assurance of publication, I finally had a contract in hand (not on Lana paper, mind you) and was so excited, I decided to pencil the last 50 pages and then ink them in one big batch. All fired up, I grabbed a new Lana pad and carefully cut out the 200-odd frames to size, serrated the edges with pinking shears, and pencilled them all. When it came time to ink - there is no other way to put this - the shameless skank did the dirty on me: every single page of that pad was defective. Instead of the ink sitting smoothly on the surface, it bled into little spidery hairs on every line. I had to ditch all 200 drawings and start again.

The things I said about Winsor & Newton at that time should not be repeated. But, like a besotted fool, I took Lana back. I love that paper. I haven't found anything else to compare. Call me deluded, call me a hopeless addict, but I really, really want a regular supply.

Four more weeks and my order will come through. Until then, I'll be anointing my remaining four sheets with obsessive application of opaque acrylic inks, and hoping that my coy mistress will be here soon.

What I did on my holidays

After two weeks in Byron Bay, I am thoroughly relaxed, revived, and ready to bite into 2008. It looks to be a very busy year!

Our holiday was not all play, though. I took an extra little suitcase just for art materials, and spent a good two hours most days working away at the minute details of this painting, which is the first of my Hamlet backgrounds. If you look at it up close, you will see thousands of minute circles in the sky, and thousands of tiny "broken" tiles. As you can imagine, it was extremely laborious, time-consuming work, but I am very pleased with the result. Here it is, complete:

The "tiles" are inspired by the trencadis mosaic work of Antoni Gaudi. Gaudi's work is an endless source of delight for me, as well as giving me little pangs of nostalgia for the year I spent in Barcelona. The colour scheme was inspired by a beautiful new year card sent to me in December by my frield Will D. The card shows a detail of an oil painting called Thousand and One Nights by Vittorio Zecchin. It was painted between 1900 and 1912 - and for some reason Blogger insists on inserting the photo of it sideways! I love the profusion of detail in this style of painting. Here it is:


My picture is on an A3 sheet of cartridge paper, and both the background colour and all those tiny patterns are painted using a mindblowingly fabulous product: Magic Color acrylic inks. Super-opaque, super-fluid, and vivid enough to make your eyeballs quiver - I think this might be the perfect colour medium! Here are the little bottles of joy:
Well, better get back to it - I have thousands of tiny white dots to go on with this afternoon, and Big Squid is invading my drawing room and berating me about my truly atrocious "filing" system for all our paperwork. Sigh. Filing! Can't I just draw my dots??

Dot dot dot

I've had a week off since the office closed for the holidays, and it's been a huge novelty for me: eight whole days with few real demands on my time. This has been my chance to do something that often gets squished out of my hectic schedule: play. By this I mean play with different arty media, experiment, mess around for an hour here and there, without trying to cram as much of a project as possible into each day.

I must admit though that my "play" has been quite directed. I've been experimenting with different styles and different media for my Hamlet backgrounds. My initial idea was to paint large-ish canvases with acrylic paint and use them as backgrounds, but I've now tossed around other ideas involving watercolour, colour pencil, drawing in Photoshop, and finally, liquid acrylic inks. The backgrounds are looking far less realistic and much more textural and strange as I go along... and I'm enjoying the process immensely. I'm especially excited by the way little dots or other tiny patterns of colour seem to vibrate with vividness when placed next to other colours.

Here's a sketchbook sample done with Aquarell pencils (no water), inspired by pointillism:
When I tried to scan this, I discovered just how appallingly useless my scanner is - so this is a photo. Come new year, I'm getting a new whiz-bang replacement scanner (rubs hands like a fly).

And here's the thing I've been working on today - some little patterns in liquid acrylic ink. The brand isn't called Magic Color for nothing - it's brilliant stuff, and fantastically opaque.
The paler pink consists of hundreds (maybe thousands?) of tiny little concentric circles painted with a 0-size brush. Took me hours, and of course it is nowhere near finished yet. Ah, joy! Is it any wonder I have eyes like a tarsier?

As of 3 January we are off on holidays for a couple of weeks, so I probably won't blog again until later in January. Happy new year, all, and may 2008 bring you many vibrating colours!

Armadillo

Whew! The Big Squid's present is finally finished, just in time for Squidmas. And here it is - a papier mache armadillo.

This was a tricky beast to construct. Its body was made of a rectangular bit of styrofoam with hoops of wire to make the shape of its back. The head was a cone of stiff paper stuffed with scrunched newspaper, and pulled in with a pair of buttons sewn on to indent the eyes. The tail is a spiral of wire stuffed with paper, and the legs are pieces of cardboard cylinder (from toilet paper rolls). Feet and ears are heavy cardboard, and the toes are made 3D with plasticene. All this was held together with masking tape before beginning the messy business of the papier mache. I did the first few layers using PVA glue and newspaper, but subsequenly found that flour-and-water paste dries harder and is easier to use - though it is quite disgusting to touch. Mysteriously, my container of hygienically boiled paste also began to ferment after a day and started to smell like old beer... but fortunately the finished product is clean and dry and smells sweetly of acrylic paint.

The armadillo is only my second papier mache beastie. The first was my bat, which I did a couple of years ago:
It's been fun playing with the acrylic paints again, and I'm hoping to spend some more time over this holiday break experimenting with acrylic, watercolour and coloured pencil to try and pin down the right media for my Hamlet backgrounds. Right now I'm thinking of very strange, otherwordly "sets", and moving away from the original, more literal scenes... but we shall see...

Well, happy holidays all - and if I don't blog before new year's eve, here's wishing you much inspiration, happiness and fulfilment for the year to come.

2007 Reading Roundup

For the last four years, I've made a list in the front of my diary of all the books that I read during that year. Looking back on these lists is a real pleasure - it brings back a particular kind of memory of the "texture" of the year. It reminds me of the reading experiences that tickled my brain, sparked ideas and furthered interests, but also of what I was doing and how I was feeling at the time.

So although the year is not yet ended, and I may squeeze in another book yet, here's my 2007 reading roundup - in the order in which I read them. Don't worry - there are no spoilers.

Tourist Season (Carl Hiaasen) - Holiday fluff picked up in Apollo Bay. Ok, fluff with shards of glass in it, but fluff nonetheless.

Take a Girl Like You (Kingsley Amis) - Teeth-grindingly dull, irritating and horribly dated. I kept on hoping it might get better, because I loved Amis's Lucky Jim so much. It made me laugh uncontrollably. No such luck with this one though.

The Ancestor's Tale (Richard Dawkins) - Love love love. Rave rave rave. This book is a "backwards journey" through evolution, showing how and when we humans link up with every other living thing on earth. Last year I read The God Delusion which was a life-changing book: I was already an atheist, but The God Delusion made me want to stand up and be counted. The Ancestor's Tale is all science but is no less engrossing.

Hamlet (William Shakespeare) - I've been reading this repeatedly throughout the year - of course!

Will in the World (Stephen Greenblatt) - excellent book about Mr Shakespeare. Very little is known about the life of the Bard, and much has been written about the little that is known. This book is fascinating because it builds up a picture of what English life and society was like in Shakespeare's time, and then muses on how Shakespeare himself may have experienced it, and how this experience may have shaped his work. Imaginative history, and extremely engaging.

The Secret River (Kate Grenville) - gripping, revealing, evocative and pretty damn horrific.

Rumpole Rests His Case (John Mortimer) - the Big Squid is a huge Rumpole devotee, and swears by a dose of him for relaxing the frazzled brain. Especially timely after reading The Secret River.

The Arrival (Shaun Tan) - Love love love love. Rave rave... Genius.

The Patron Saint of Eels (Gregory Day) - this book made me groan - and not in a good way. I thought it was sentimental, heavy-handed, tedious and obvious. Nice cover (I am very partial to eels), but what a spectacularly annoying book.

Men and Cartoons (Jonathan Lethem) - Have to admit I can't remember a whole lot of this collection of short stories. I am a fan of Lethem's novels though - especially The Fortress of Solitude.

Black Swan Green (David Mitchell) - Mitchell's Cloud Atlas blew me away when I read it last year, so I had to turn up the receptors a bit for this more low-key, straightforward story. It was very good though, and the adolescent narrator's voice was extremely authentic - as was the meticulously remembered early 80s setting. The recent film This is England reminded me of Black Swan Green quite a bit. A terrific, wrenching film, incidentally.

Old Filth (Jane Gardam) - wonderful writing, some unexpected twists, and a fascinating glimpse into the lives of "Raj Orphans", the children of well-to-do expats sent "home" to England during the war - a place that was not home to them at all.

We need to talk about Kevin (Lionel Shriver) - a huge book, which has come back to my mind many times. It is highly contentious, and forces the reader to take sides, whether they want to or not. Brings out our judgemental side, and then (hopefully) makes us question it. Very powerful. There was an aspect (which I won't go into because it would spoil it) that made me feel that as a reader I was being seriously manipulated - an experience I don't like - but I'd still definitely recommend this one.

Notes from the Teenage Underground (Simmone Howell) - this is a "young adult" book sent to me by my editor at Pan Macmillan. I haven't read YA fiction since I was in my early teens, and find it hard to comment on it. This one seemed pretty good - aimed squarely at teen girls with arty/rebellious leanings. Wonder what I would have made of it as a teen?

Gravity (Scott Gardner) - YA fiction aimed at boys: drinking, responsibility, what to do with your life etc. Not my style of book - I was more a Catcher In the Rye-reading kind of teen. (Ok, that's the last of the YA stuff for the year).

Let the Right One In (John Ajvide Lindqvist) - Ohhhhhhhhh I ADORED this book! It's a horror story with vampires, but emphatically NOT of the world of cloaks, chalices, castles and all the other cliched accoutrements of fantasy. I will declare my bias right away - I hate fantasy novels. Anything with a wizard, a dragon, an ancient curse, a magical book, or a goddamn ring in it in it makes me want to go on an elf-stomping rampage. But this book is set in the grimy, super-realistic setting of a dormitory suburb in Stockholm, and the vampire is a dirty-looking little girl, the object of desire of a paedophile... Oh, and it's a love story too. A brilliant book - funny, hideous and so close to the edge you wonder how the hell Lindqvist did it. I can't wait for the movie - it'll be a scream.

Hotel Babylon (Imogen Edwards-Jones) - Total waste of time. Not even worth criticising.

The Brooklyn Follies (Paul Auster) - Big thumbs up - really enjoyed it.

The Bay of Noon (Shirley Hazzard) – I think Shirley Hazzard is great. Her writing reminds me of a wonderful watercolour painting where the artist makes it all look free and spontaneous – lots of luminous washes and subtle hues.

Happiness (Matthieu Ricard) - Life changing! I read it twice, making lots of notes. Ricard is a French super-scientist turned Buddhist monk. He explores scientific and Buddhist philosophical analyses of happiness and sets out some very useful meditation exercises for training your brain to promote wellbeing. I find the techniques extremely useful. My mate Andrew once told me that Buddhism was almost exactly the same as Cognitive Behavioual Therapy - and this book does draw many parallels. Highly recommended. Good for the life of the mind, and not faith-based at all.

Dead Europe (Christos Tsiolkas) - very disturbing and confronting. This book made me want to meet the author and ask him a lot of questions. I needed another dose of Rumpole after this one. But instead I read...

The Time Traveler's Wife (Audrey Niffenegger) - Wonderful! Amazing! Where did I put that box of extra-special superlatives? An instant favourite book, which is a big call.

The Fate of the Artist (Eddie Campbell) - I read this in a rush, as I was due to meet Eddie for the first time that week, and didn't want to arrive in complete ignorance. It was a bit unnerving to meet a person after just having read about various intimate details of his life! Bittersweet-funny. I especially liked the adaptation of the O Henry story at the end.

From Hell (Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell) - Part 2 of my preparatory reading. Took me a good while to get into this - I initially found it very hard to read. An amazingly detailed, meticulously researched and creepy book.

The Black Diamond Detective Agency (Eddie Campbell) - I really enjoyed this. Gorgeous painting in gouache, and a rip-roaring story.

Pyongyang (Guy Delisle) - Fabulous fabulous fabulous. I loved every frame. This is Guy Delisle’s cartoon diary of a few months spent in the ultra-weird world of the North Korean capital city. A revelation. Funny and shocking and very sharp and true.

Unpolished Gem (Alice Pung) – memoir by Melbourne lawyer and writer, about growing up between two cultures and experiencing the pressures of both, set in the Western suburbs of Melbourne. Alice Pung was in hear early 20s when she wrote this – impressive.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (Michael Chabon) – another instant favourite. You’ll think I’m just a big tart when it comes to favourite books, but seriously – it’s been a good year. Chabon is absolutely brilliant. Love love love… more love…

Shenzhen (Guy Delisle) – great stuff – though Pyongyang was even better.

After the Snooter (Eddie Campbell) – a little insect tells me this isn’t the last we’ll hear of this creature.

The Question of Hamlet (Harry Levin) – a slim volume packing huge insights. Excellent commentary, and invaluably helpful for my Hamlet adaptation. Yay for eBay, where I bought it.

Othello (William Shakespeare, adapted by Oscar Zarate) – an excellent cartoon adaptation. The faces reminded me a bit of Japanese masks – especially Iago. Rises wonderfully well to the drama and passion of the play. Some really nice layouts, and no annoying flashiness.

American Born Chinese (Gene Luen Yang) – I quite enjoyed this, though the interweaving of the “spiritual” monkey tales with a Christian bent didn’t do it for me. The slice of life parts were good though.

Understanding Comics (Scott McCloud) – I’d managed to put off reading this for years, and finally got down to it. Good stuff, which wouldn’t have seemed at all contentious to me until I encountered the Force That Is Campbell. It didn’t change my life, but then, I already do comics.

King Lear (William Shakespeare, adapted by Ian Pollock) – I’m still in two minds about this adaptation. The drawing style is wild and very creepy, and I like it a lot. But I think the interaction of the characters, and the “acting and direction” plodded a bit. My friend Greg described it as “claustrophobic”.

Rooftops (Mandy Ord) – see here for more.

Shakespearean Tragedy [part only] (A. C. Bradley) – apparently this used to be the standard school text for studying the Tragedies. Written in about 1909 (I think), it’s pretty stodgy stuff.

Persepolis I and II (Marjane Satrapi) – Great stuff – ashamed that I hadn’t read it sooner. It left me wanting to know more, more, more about the details and consequences of many of the episodes.

Modern Hamlets and their soliloquies (Mary Z Maher) – Fascinating. Again, an invaluable tool and a great prompt for looking at the character of Hamlet from different perspectives. Glad I read it when I was already well into the roughs though - it might have been overwhelming otherwise!

Now reading… The Human Mind [and how to make the most of it] (Robert Winston) – fascinating and thought-provoking popular science of the lighter, easier-to-read variety. Enjoying it very much.

So - any recommendations?

From the control room

Well, my eyes are stretched completely out of shape and my hand is squinched up into a little claw, but I've done it - I've finished the roughs for Hamlet! The roughs come to 347 pages (all pencilled and inked!). The final work will be a bit longer, as there are a few parts I need to rework, but for the moment, I can end the year knowing that the roughs are sorted!

The last 13 pages were a killer - literally. This is where the Queen, the King, Laertes and Hamlet (in that order) all kick the bucket in tragic style. Hamlet took me more than five hours to die... it's no wonder I'm wrung out!

So, for a bit of recreation, here are a few photos of my drawing room (no, not a place for English ladies to take tea - I mean my little studio). I'm always fascinated to peek into other scribblers' workspaces, so I hope that if I post mine here, I might receive a few links to pictures of other people's messy desks, decorated walls and overflowing shelves...

Here goes:
Desk #1, where I draw. As you can see, no angled drawing board or ergonomic chair. I like a hard wooden chair to sit on. This is actually my first ever desk, which I must have got at age 6 or 7. Dad stuck a larger top on it when it became apparent that, even as a kid, I needed plenty of space to strew my mess over.

The enormous folder in the front is the Hamlet roughs. And at eye level on the wall is that lovely picture of Ginevra King.


Much-needed shelf space for all the odds and ends that don't fit into the bookcase.

The mysterious newspaper-pasted thing at the bottom is a work in progress, which I hope to complete before Squidmas. It's a large papier mache armadillo - I'm planning to give it to the Big Squid as a present. It was supposed to be a surprise, but you just try hiding a great big armadillo from your beloved... Actually, when Big Squid accidentally saw it he thought it was a pig - so there is still a small element of surprise involved.

And a couple of things from the walls...

Daisy with a lot of "test" nib strokes... and coffee! I love looking at roughs, tests and scribble pages, and try to hang onto as many as I can.

Here's part of my collection of saints, martyrs and other iconic-looking types. Bernini's Saint Teresa in Ecstasy (top left) is my favourite. In the middle and just to the left you can see that great tragic character, Withnail, as played by Richard E Grant. Sigh... Is it possible to watch him do Hamlet's "what a piece of work is a man" speech and not get a tear in the eye?