My brush pen has been busy...

Last week I showed a few pages from Hamlet at a conference called "Multiliteracies". I was on a panel with Shaun Tan and Bruce Mutard, moderated by the fabulous Erica Wagner of Allen & Unwin, and we were talking about graphic novels (of course!). Good fun, and as always more ideas than we could cram into the allotted time.

So, now that I've shown a few pages in public, I (finally) feel ready to reveal a tiny glimpse on the blog. Only a tiny glimpse though! Here's Polonius, popping out in our faces.
I'm really pleased with the torn paper - and yes, it is "real" - scanned in a delicate balancing arrangement so as not to squash the little "petals", then tidied and colour-corrected on Photoshop. Oooh, I love doing collage. And even though there are no actual scissors and glue involved here, it's still lots of fun.

There's a fair bit of sitting around waiting for the computer to process some of the larger images in Hamlet. For example, getting my 1200 dpi scans of the black ink-work into the right spot on a 300dpi page involves a 5 minute "transform" process. What's an impatient girl like me to do during such an enormous stretch of empty time? I can't resort to the internet, because that crashes Photoshop during a transform. So instead I play with my biggest brush pen, and fool about with creatures like this:
But more often, I must admit, I'm distracted by other creatures!
Awwwww!!!

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.

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!

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?

I tell thee, churlish priest -

Here's a snippet of one of my recent rough pages for Hamlet. It shows Laertes at his sister Ophelia's burial, pleading with the priest to give her a decent funeral service. The priest refuses, on the basis that Ophelia's death was "doubtful" - ie, she may have committed suicide.

In a subsequent panel we see Laertes lose his temper (just for a change) and tell the "churlish priest" that "a minist'ring angel shall my sister be when thou liest howling".

Noone really knows what Shakespeare's views on faith and religion were, but from his writing he doesn't appear to have been vociferously religious. Given England's merry-go-round of changes from Catholicism to Protestantism and back again that characterised his century, and all the attendant persecution of whoever wasn't on the right side at any given moment, I can imagine the clear-eyed Mr Shakespeare looking on and judging religion to be a terrible - and not very funny - joke. Though I would also accept the charge that I am at least partly projecting my own views onto him!

In any case, the priest in this scene gets no sympathy from Shakespeare. And I had a lot of fun with his portrayal as a dessicated, haughty-looking thing, obsessed with form and dogma and deaf to actual human suffering. Because my little creatures are actually actors playing the parts of the characters, I also decided to give the priest's role to the same actor who plays the second clown or gravedigger, just for a bit of fun. The gravediggers appear in the pages immediately preceding the funeral scene, so the rapid switch from "straight man" clown/workman to supercilious priest is all the more amusing. In rough form the gravediggers look like this:


The first gravedigger (who gets all the best lines) is partly inspired by my husband, the Big Squid. I like the idea that he is the only character in the play happily untouched by tragedy. But for the record, the Big Squid does not have three eyes, and is far more handsome than this!

Speaking of Hamlet adaptations, my mate Greg Gerrand, googler extraordinaire, recently sent me a link to yet another manga-style adaptation of Hamlet. Happily, it is better than the one that is out in the shops at the moment. The "Self-Made Hero Manga Hamlet is pretty horrible. It's set in the future/in space, which wouldn't necessarily bother me in itself, but I really cringed at how brutally it chops up the text. And the art... well, it's pretty ugly. Here's an excerpt from a review:

[the reviewer compares one of Hamlet's soliloquies with the chopped version in the Manga edition, and then writes:]

Shorn of the allusion to classical antiquity and the scathing critique of Elizabethean actors, Hamlet’s speech has been reduced to an action plan for gauging Claudius’ guilt. It’s a fair gloss on this very famous soliloquy, I guess, but one that misses the beauty and richness of Shakespeare’s language.

Perhaps these editorial decisions would be less distasteful if the artwork was well executed. Alas, poor Yorick, it’s awful. The panels are a jumbled mess; the characters’ appearances vary considerably from page to page; the figures are posed without regard for anatomy or proportion; and the backgrounds are virtually non-existent.

[...]

By now, I’m sure there are a few librarians, educators, or high school students who are reading this and thinking, This woman just doesn’t get it. These books make Shakespeare accessible to students who might otherwise find the material too daunting. But to be useful as pedagogical tools, adaptations must illuminate an aspect of the original that’s difficult for modern audiences to understand. In the case of Shakespeare, it’s the language, not the basic plotlines, that poses difficulty for most readers. If your illustrations for, say, Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech simply show him looking pensive, then you haven’t added anything of explanatory value to the original. [my emphasis - NG] Shakespeare is especially tricky in this regard because so much of the action takes place off stage. Reaction and reflection lend themselves nicely to soliloquies, but are difficult to capture in pictures. Students would be better served by renting a good filmed version of Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet than reading these manga treatments, as a film not only shows us what’s happening, but allows us to hear the emotions and sentiments behind language that sometimes confounds modern ears.

I absolutely agree with this. The enormous challenge of adapting Shakespeare in illustrated form is to allow the incredibly rich language to sing, as it would on stage, and then to add something more in the visual interpretation - something that draws out the meaning of the words, conjures up ideas, and explores the allusions and echoes in the language. And of course, you want the characters to be personable and believable in themselves, in their emotions and in their interactions. This is a big ask - it's like mounting a stage or screen production, but with the huge limitation of being restricted to ink on a page, without the benefit of sound or real, continuous motion! To mention just two of the challenges, timing must be handled carefully, and layout and transition are extremely delicate juggling acts. There are, of course, ways in which an illustrated adaptation allows greater freedom than a stage adaptation, in that the "special effects" that you can add (showing what is happening inside people's minds, for example) are limitless. I am finding the process absolutely fascinating.

The new Manga Hamlet by Adam Sexton and Tintin Pantoja looks better than the Self-Made Hero one, from the few pages shown on this website. I must admit that the manga aesthetic is not really my cup of tea, but the art in this adaptation is definitely more appealing than the Self-Made Hero one. And the text seems to be less badly butchered. I'll be interested to have a read when it comes out.

Ord Ord Ord!

Last weekend I had the pleasure of attending the launch of Mandy Ord's graphic novel, Rooftops.

Rooftops is published by local independent publisher Finlay Lloyd - and much kudos to them for doing a brilliant production job and presenting Mandy's beautiful work so well. The book is in an unusual format - not quite as wide as the usual paperback - which allows it to fit nicely in your hand, almost giving it the feel of a guidebook. And in a way it is like a secret guide to the Melbourne CBD, where most of the story takes place. Mandy's one-eyed protagonist scoots past landmarks big and little, from under the ground to high up above the rooftops, and her inky brush lingers on wonderful architectural details, giving them a chunky black, texture-filled feel.

Mandy is, of course, the queen of the mostly-black image (for those unfamiliar with her work - imagine a sort of woodcut effect, but done with a brush), and in this book the space around the panels is black too - an effect which I love. Far from looking claustrophobic, busy or gothic, Mandy's work always jumps off the page fresh and engaging and full of life, and this is no exception. Great cream paper and lush printing means that the black is really black too. Mmmmm....

The story is a curious one, dancing around questions of coincidence and what we make of it. In his joyously theatrical launching speech, Mr Bernard Caleo described coincidences as "the knots that tie the universe together", and those mysterious tangles are at the heart of Mandy's book. Don't worry - it's not mystic mumbo jumbo (Mandy also illustrates for Australian Rationalist!) but more a musing on the mysteries of connectedness - especially connectedness of the imagination/intellect.

A large slab of the book involves conversations between Mandy and her buddy Greg. Greg is rendered so extraordinarily true to life, that I was actually quite distracted by the unnerving accuracy of the portrait. As a result, I feel like I missed some important nuances in these parts of the book. This is no reflection on Mandy's storytelling - rather a compliment on her ability to capture a person on the page. So I think I need to give the book a few more readings so that I take better note of what is going on in these sections. I'd be really interested to hear how others (who don't know Greg) read these parts of the book.

All in all - recommended! And exciting, both in its own right and as another manifestation of non-comic publishers in Australia embracing the graphic novel form. Yippee!

While on the subject of mega-talented Melbourne artists, I've recently been enjoying the gorgeous blog of designer and crafty lady Sandra Eterovic. Since Mr Campbell's blog is "resting" at the moment, I've lost my favourite regular blog read - but I think I've now found a replacement. Sandra posts lots of pictures of her beautiful illustration and other art projects (textiles, collage, paintings, sculptures, drawings etc) and takes us through a little of the process of making them, including lots of pics of the various source materials that have inspired her.

Fabulous. More, please!

Here's my card!

Yesterday I spent an enjoyable few hours with my eyes jammed hard against the monitor, working on a design for my business card. My eyes now resemble those of the fish from too much screen goggling, but I've settled on this (left) as the final design.

The original design for the reverse of the card looked like this image (on the right):

I like this picture very much, but when I sent it to the Fabulous Sebastian for his comment, he suggested that, while it was nice to look at, it might compete too much with the front of the card. He then came up with the very clever idea of having the fish reversed on the back so that it seemed to go right "through" the card.

I liked this idea so much that I thought I might elaborate on it a bit, and have the text flipped as well, but partly obscured by clouds on the reverse. So the result looks like this:













Ah, Photoshop! Aint it a wonderful toy?

The fish is not my own drawing, of course. I got him from that favourite resource of mine, the Dover Animals book of copyright-free illustrations. He was a black-and-white engraving to begin with, and I made him colourful with much filter-fiddling and plenty of playing with my favourite Photoshop paintbrush, the one called "chalk". The chalk brush gives a convincing "scraped" texture, and looks much more natural than the other brushes I've used. Depending on the opacity etc, it can resemble charcoal, watercolour, ink wash etc. I used it here for the clouds as well.

Confusingly, there are several "chalk" brushes on the same Photoshop brush palette. My favourite is the one that is not grouped with the other chalks, but is tucked away on its own, further down the list. Its starting size is 36 point, which makes it easy to identify.

Ok, that's enough geekage from me. I'm going to go and play with my brush pens.

Ooow! My face!

My face hurts!

No, I haven't ended up in another comic artist smackdown. This time it's entirely self-inflicted.

I've spent the day drawing roughs for Hamlet, specifically the harrowing "closet scene" where the Dane confronts - and harangues - his trollop of a mother. This involves drawing a lot of angry faces - for example, this:

It seems to be pretty common ("Ay madam, 'tis common!") among cartoonists that when we draw a face, we can't help assuming precisely the expression we are drawing. I've tested this out by trying to draw one kind of expression while setting my face in another, and the result is a lot of terrible facial contortions in both places: the picture comes out looking all wrong, and my face starts twitching desperately in the manner of John Howard during the recent "great" debate (ugh!).

So of course I go with what works, and wear the faces as I draw them. Problem is, after doing nine pages of roughs today, in which Hamlet runs the gamut from indignation to rage through to extreme revulsion and back again, I've had my face set in those very attitudes for literally hours. If the wind were to change at some point today (and remember, this is Melbourne), I might have ended up looking permanently like this:
Not pretty. Not comfortable either. Imagine the terrible wrinkles I'm going to have after 350 pages of this... and that's just the roughs! That thing in my hand, by the way, is my Pentel Aquash brush pen - and it's the greatest thing since the invention of ink. Just thinking about it smoothes those lines right away.

I wonder just how common this "face mirrors hand" thing is. Talking with other scribblers recently has made me realise that many of the techniques and experiences and quirks that I assume are almost universal are in fact different for each person. For example, the other day I heard about a cartoonist who says that he is never surprised by how his work comes out. This is almost inconceivable to me. I am constantly surprised by ideas and forms that emerge while immersed in a picture. So I wonder - does everyone make the faces they draw? Are there people who can conjure up a lively, meaningful expression on the page without simultaneously doing it themselves?

And do cucumber slices on the eyes really work?

Carne viva

Well, check this out! This is a still-throbbing tattoo that was applied just yesterday to the right arm and shoulder of punk DJ, wrestling commentator, sometime Vampire MC and all-round firecracker the Fabulous Sebastian. I designed it for him only a couple of weeks ago, and here it is already, en carne viva. Wow.

I've only know Sebastian for a short time, but he has quickly showed himself to be the human incarnation of a devilishly raised eyebrow. An irresistible conversationalist, and a very fascinating creature indeed. So when he asked me to design a tattoo for him, I almost tripped over my nibs to get to the brush pen and have at it.

The request was for a skull. He's already got a very different-looking skull on the left arm, courtesy of Devil's Candy designer Eva Collado. I'd shown Sebastian a couple of my preliminary Hamlet pictures, and he liked the twisted black lines of Hamlet's "hair", so I decided to incorporate a variation of those lines into the design. As it turns out though, the lines in the tattoo design are very different to anything I'd envisaged using in Hamlet. However, I like them so much, that I'm thinking up ways that they might be incorporated into the book. The brush pen lends itself perfectly to these delicate swirls and mid-curve kinks, and I found that it led my hand quite unexpectedly into a whole new style. This is what the first version looked like:

When Sebastian showed it to the tattooist, he was told that the very fine "white" areas within the black would not work well. Apparently tattoo ink spreads in the skin over the years, so very small spaces tend to get eaten up by the black. I needed to get rid of some of the tiny white dots (a pity - I like them), and Sebastian also asked me to add some more curls at the sides of the skull, so that the design would wrap around his arm more.

To do this without the risk of messing up the original drawing, I laid a sheet of tracing paper over the top and did the new lines on that. My new Pentel fountain brush pen came in handy here, as its ink is waterproof and sits nicely on the tracing paper (the Chinese non-waterproof ink in my Pentel Aquash breaks up into beads on the surface). I then scanned the new parts, made a couple of small changes and added them to the existing scanned image, so the result looked like this:

And that is pretty much how it went onto the arm - apart from the enlarged tears which Sebastian said reminded him of prisoners!

It does look a little bit different when it's wrapped around a three-dimensional body - and it gives me the absolute shivers to see it there, on a living canvas! I have warned Sebastian that next time I'm up in Sydney, I'm going to take so many photos of him flaunting the tattoo that the ink is going to fade under the flash-bulb onslaught.

So, we're all happy. Sebastian has offered himself as my Muse (and there is some sort of resemblance to the Dane, I have to admit), and I've offered to design as many tattoos as he wants to bear. He's already asked me about starting on a second one...

I'm hooked. How could I say no?

Daisy

This post is a little overdue - it's a few weeks now since I promised Paul Macdonald (of The Children's Bookshop in Sydney) a few pictures of Daisy Buchanan as I first drew her... eight years ago, as a dirty, dirty bird. So, apologies, and here is the story of Daisy's evolution.

Daisy Buchanan, as she appears in my adaptation of The Great Gatsby, looks like this (on the left). She's fluffy, gleamingly gold-and-white, delicately - maybe even precariously - balanced and full of charm:
Of course she's also selfish, careless, and morally bereft. Which is why my original idea was to draw Daisy and her cohorts as dirty creatures, showing the prickles, the grot and corruption underneath their glittering surfaces. My first character drawing for Daisy looked like this:
As I played around (obsessively) with my needle-fine crow quill nibs, Daisy got more and more elaborate:
...and also less wire-haired and dirty-looking. Her feather-fuzz acquired a more sparkly feel, and her head became rounder and more coiffed. A dirty Daisy just didn't seem quite... right. The more I thought about the book as a whole, the more wrong my original idea felt. A character like Daisy had to look beautiful, I realised, because allure, glamour and the glittering surface of things are so central to the world that Fitzgerald immerses us in. We need to experience that world and its privileged stars as gorgeously alluring, even as we see the emptiness, callousness and corruption beneath the polished skin. Making Daisy a dirty bird was not only going to be heavy-handed and obvious, but it would destroy the gossamer cloak of glamour that Fitzgerald spreads out for us over his Jazz Age tragedy.

So Daisy got even whiter, even more soft-and-sparkly...
...and her accessories got excruciatingly detailed. The motif on that armchair took forever to draw!

The problem with this incarnation was the face. It didn't have the scope for the subtle expression, suggestion, flirtation and emotion that is so important in Daisy's character. Daisy has to be able to seduce you with a tilt of her eyelashes, ensnare your sympathy against your will with a shy bite of her underlip, and betray you with a smirk. This strange creature's face, with its feather-rimmed eyes couldn't do that. I decided that Daisy's face had to be drawn with fewer lines, and with features far more capable of a range of subtle expression.

It was in the process of drawing the roughs for the book that Daisy really assumed her current form. I was drawing the characters very simply to plan the book out, and these lightly-cast forms and faces just appeared so much more lively and expressive than the extremely laboured original character drawings. Here's an example from right at the start of the roughs:
And as you can see, Daisy ended up looking very little like all those painstaking preliminary drawings, but instead took her final form from the quickly-pencilled roughs. I ended up doing the final drawings with a much sturdier steel nib than the little crow quills, and simplifying the characters a lot. The result, I think, is much more inviting to the eye.

So, could I have skipped all the bother (and the many, many hours!) of the original drawings and gone straight to the simpler forms? I don't think so. My inky gut tells me that all that initial extravagance was necessary, even though much of it was ultimately discarded. A couple of weeks ago, Shaun Tan and I got to discussing this very thing - and it turns out that he does something similar when developing an idea. Shaun explained that his initial drawings are often wildly "out there", detailed and extravagant, but that as he develops the idea, the visual elements are wound back to a less extreme form, one which works better, with greater possibility for engaging/communicating with the reader.

And hey - if it's good enough for Shaun Tan, it's sure as hell good enough for me!

Why I drew them this way

On Thursday I gave a bunch of presentations and a comics workshop for students at Melbourne High School, a state school for boys which selects its students on the basis of academic ability. The workshop in particular was great fun - the students were enthusiastic, engaged and willing to have a go - and they came up with some terrific, original and very accomplished stuff.

A couple of the guys were drawing really impressive architectural backgrounds with wonderful fluency. I find architecture very challenging. It is something that I had never attempted before The Great Gatsby, and therefore something I had to consciously work at learning. When I commented on this, the archi-talented student seemed surprised. He said that backgrounds and buildings came very naturally for him, but that he found facial expressions very hard.

I have always taken for granted the fun and ease of creating lively, emotionally resonant facial expressions and the characters that use them. So I wonder what sort of "learning" is involved if you want to become more fluent in this aspect of creating characters. To a very large extent I think it is intuitive - which is not to say that such intuition can't be developed and improved.

Probably the most important thing, if I try to analyse my own scribbling experience, is learning to fully inhabit your character. By really exploring and getting to know the creature you're drawing, you have a sense of how they move, how their face expresses emotion, how a twist of an eyebrow conveys a particular attitude and so on. And when the pen is in my hand, I find that I also inhabit the character physically: my face will always take on precisely the expression that I'm trying to draw. Lots of other illustrators have told me that they do exactly the same thing.

In The Great Gatsby, I've taken the expression idea one step further, and tried to make each character's entire physical form embody the complex personality bestowed on him or her by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Just before the book came out, my wonderful publisher at Allen & Unwin suggested that it would be a good idea if I also wrote a few lines on each character to explain why I drew them this way. It was an interesting exercise, trying to concisely summarise the long, complicated, delicate and largely intuitive process of interpreting Fitzgerald's written characters in visual form. The one I find most difficult to summarise in words is Daisy. Daisy is my favourite character. She took a lot of thought and preparation and experimentation, but once I got her as I wanted her, I really do believe I got her just right.

It is hard for me to explain in words why Daisy looks as she does, but happily enough there is another picture that can help - and it's at the top of this post. About three years into the project, when I'd already finished a large slab of the book, my mum sent me a newspaper article which included a photograph of Fitzgerald's first love, the gorgeous debutante Ginevra King. It is said that Ginevra appeared in almost all of Fitzgerald's beautiful, unattainable female characters, and particularly in Daisy Buchanan. When I saw the photograph, I was overjoyed. Ginevra King, a woman deep in Fitzgerald's mind and heart, bore an uncanny resemblance to my version of Daisy.

And, for those who are interested, here are the very brief explanations that I wrote for Allen & Unwin.

Daisy Buchanan: Daisy is a complex character: charming, careless, morally compromised - and disappointed. Her feather-light flightiness and air of luxury are conveyed by her white, fluffy round head, while her slender, elegant neck and hands suggest both seductive charm and vulnerability.

Tom Buchanan: Everything about Tom’s personality is overbearing, arrogant and brutal, as embodied in his big, hulking, hyper-masculine body and brutish face. He occupies more space than anyone else, suggesting substantial social and financial power.

Nick Carraway: Our narrator is a gentle, somewhat ambivalent person, so I picture him as a smaller, soft-bodied creature. Nick’s expressive feelers give form to his sensitive ‘moral antennae’ which, although finely tuned, are also susceptible to swaying.

Jordan Baker: Cool, slippery and not to be trusted – Jordan is a slim, haughty squid-like creature, difficult to pin down and emotionally absent.

Myrtle Wilson: Poor Myrtle Wilson is all vulgar, overripe sex and loud, ugly pretension. She is unsophisticated and inelegant, but oozing sensuality: one big eye, an indiscreetly wide mouth, and enormous, multi-teated breasts. A bad end is almost inevitable…

George Wilson: Myrtle’s downtrodden, cuckolded husband is a nervous, sickly-looking, hand-wringing creature. But his tail looks a little like a scorpion’s, foreshadowing the violent consequences when George is pushed to the limit.

Jay Gatsby: Gatsby is a self-made enigma, a mystery deepened by its contradictions. He is simultaneously heartbreakingly sincere and utterly fake, noble and corrupt, glamorous and gauche. His form is inspired by the seahorse – a gorgeous, impossible-looking animal that seems to have been put together from bits of other creatures.