Ravens and graves

Here's a detail from the graveyard background for Hamlet - probably the most literal of the backgrounds in both colouring and layout. I wanted this set to look bright and springlike, as a foil for the sadness of Ophelia's untimely, flower-strewn death, and also because the brightness suits the gravediggers' comedy routine at the start of the scene. The colours and the shape of the little flowers were very much inspired by that Vittorio Zecchin image from the Thousand and One Nights - and I think it could probably do with even more of the flowers creeping up over the gravestones.

Ravens and graveyards seem to go together in the ominous imagination, so it's apt that I received this excellent news last week: The Great Gatsby has been selected as a "White Raven" for the 2008 Bologna Book Fair!

As my wonderful publisher explained: "This means that it is one of the 250 outstanding new international books for children and young adults that have been selected for The White Ravens 2008 from the thousands of books that the International Youth library in Munich received as review copies from publishers, authors, illustrators, and organisations from all over the world from the last calendar year. The books for this exhibition will be displayed at the International Youth Library stand at the Bologna Children's Book Fair."

Yay!

An absolute rose

"An absolute rose" is something Daisy calls Nick in The Great Gatsby. It's also what this accidental sculpture made me think of. Pity about my blurry, camera-jiggling flashless photography, but I rather like the idea. It's sitting on my desk, saved from the bin by its rosy appeal.

The ink has been in play this week and I've finished another of the Hamlet backgrounds, but I'm very weary thanks to a bunch of interstate trips crammed into a short time. Hopefully this next couple of days will be a good reviver before I head off once again on Wednesday to go to the Somerset Celebration of Literature - a writers festival focusing on childrens and young adult literature. Should be fun!

Gimme texture!

Today I've been playing with watercolour paints on good quality Arches watercolour paper. I am spectacularly bad with watercolours (although, like all beginners, I have the occasional lucky break) - but I love the luminosity of the colours, and most especially, I love the look of the texture of the paper.

The whole business of stretching watercolour paper is quite fiddly. My first attempts failed, as the masking tape I used to tape the soaked sheets to any portable flat surface I could find (the glass on framed paintings, a rubber cutting board, an old cupboard door and two baking trays!) failed to stick. So back into the bath went all the (very buckled) paper, and I tried again with that unbelievably sticky gummed artists tape. For the record, even that doesn't stick to non-stick baking trays!

Anyway, this morning I attacked a few of my stretched sheets with reckless abandon and painted some big splodgy things that are supposed to be clouds. The results are pretty ugly, though there are little sections that look slightly pleasing. The thing I liked best was that when I scanned one of these sections on my amazing super-dooper new scanner (Epson Perfection V500 Photo... mmmmm...), you could see all the lovely textured tooth of the paper in the scanned image.

This got me thinking about a way to tweak my Hamlet backgrounds a little. Of course they are hand-painted, but they're done on W&N's lovely smooth cartridge - and when scanned, the colours look just a little bit flat. So this afternoon I made my first ever texture to use in Photoshop, by scanning a blank sheet of that beautiful Arches watercolour paper.

I applied the texture to a test scan of one of the Hamlet backgrounds, and - presto! - the result looks like this (note - this is enlarged. The actual image, and therefore the grain, is smaller):


I'm delighted with the effect - it just adds a nice organic touch to the image, and reminds you that it is made of paint on paper. I'll probably play with the direction of the texture lighting a bit, too, and see what looks most natural. Funny how a layer of technological intervention is required to create an organic, "real" feeling of paint, when the original image most definitely is paint on paper!

It's a huge time-eater, this business of tweaking pictures in Photoshop. I actually try and avoid doing it wherever possible, because the temptation can be to massage everything until it either melts into goo or looks terribly artificial. The trick is knowing when to stop - preferably sooner rather than later.

Seasoned photoshop people probably know how to make textures already, but for those who don't (like me until 15 minutes ago), it is super easy:

1. Scan your textured material, or take a photo. I scanned my paper at 600dpi, in colour, and lowered the brightness a bit.
2. Convert it to grayscale.
3. Save it as a psd file.
4. To apply the texture to a layer in another image, have that image open in RGB mode. Go to Filter > texture > texturiser. In the drop-down of texture styles, pick "load texture" and just browse and find your texture. Then you can fiddle with the depth, lighting etc

Cool! Even a Photoshop puddler like me can do it!

Now I think it's time to put those baking trays to the purpose for which they were intended - I'm going to make a batch of vegetarian pasties!

In the closet

Here's the latest of the Hamlet backgrounds - Queen Gertrude's closet. The photo doesn't really convey the depth of the colours properly - they look richer in real life. Secret internal places, heavy, dripping velvet, muffling, suffocating lushness... these are the things I want to suggest. I also wanted this image to contrast with the cold, calculating-but-vertiginous sense of the King's room.

Call me unsympathetic, but I don't like Gertrude at all. She's sloppy and oozy and easily led. In my more searching, objective moments I wonder why I am quite so harsh on the old slapper. And I suspect that women's cruel judgements of one another may have a trace of insecurity in them: we hate what we fear could be lurking somewhere in us as well.

Compared to the other paintings, each of which took days and days of painstaking patterning, this one was done surprisingly quickly. And I did surprise myself with looser, easier, bigger brush strokes. For this I have to thank the wonderful Terry Denton, children's author and illustrator, and painter, with whom I spent a lovely time at the Perth Writers Festival last week. Terry showed me his sketchbook full of beautiful, loose-and-lively sketches, all splashed with vivid watercolours. They were amazing, and inspired me to set aside a bit more time for playing with colour and wet media. More immediately (because of course I pushed play aside and pounced obsessively onto Hamlet as soon as I hit Melbourne), he inspired me to try a slightly less "controlled" style for Gertrude's chamber. Ok, I'm not exactly flinging the ink about with abandon here, but compared to the extreme control of every milimetre in the other pictures, this one is quite spontaneous! And I enjoyed it immensely.

Here it is at a much earlier stage. I really like looking at work in progress, which is why I've started snapping a few pictures along the way:
In other, much more dramatic and exciting news, my mega-talented cousin, Eva Orner, won the Oscar for best documentary for her film Taxi to the Dark Side. And she called the US government war criminals. She is such a star!!

Being green... and heading out West

Here's the fourth of my Hamlet backgrounds. While this is in some ways the simplest one so far, it was actually quite tricky to do - not least because after a few hours all those circles cease to look like cute little wasabi peas and start to pull weird optical illusion-type tricks on the eyes.

Painting all those dots gave me plenty of time to think about the connotations of particular shades of green. Green is traditionally thought to represent poison - perhaps because arsenic was used to make green pigments. And of course green is the colour of envy. It's the colour of many, many lovely things as well - not least being my first love, Kermit - but for this picture (the King's private rooms) I wanted to choose shades of green that suggested bitterness, poison, scheming, envy and unwholesomeness. So if you feel a bit queasy just looking at this image, then all is as it should be.

Here's a detail, which is quite pretty (but please excuse my blurry flashless photography):

Once again, those opaque acrylic inks amaze me. I originally painted a few other props into this picture, which took me ages because they involved lots of fidldy colour and detail. But I then decided that I didn't like them at all. These inks have such good opacity, and therefore covering power, that I just painted over the top of the unwanted items with my background green, painted some more wasabi peas over the top, and - magic!- you can't even see the joins.

However, after all that, my eyes were doing something very like this:

In other news, on Wednesday this week I'm off to the Perth Writers Festival, which is part of the Perth International Arts Festival. It looks like a fabulous program, and I've never been to Western Australia, so I'm looking forward to it very much. I'll be talking about Gatsby in a couple of sessions for older students in the schools program, and will be on two panels in the general program.

So hand me my party frock - I'm going West!

Doing anything on Valentines Day?

I'm doing a talk about Gatsby at the Port Philip / St Kilda Library this Thursday 14 February at 7 pm. So if you're not going to be sitting in a restaurant buying odourless cellophane-wrapped roses from wandering rose sellers, feel free to join me. The details (from the library website) are:

Graphic novelist talk - Nicki Greenberg and The Great Gatsby

Nicki Greenberg is a comic artist and illustrator who has recently produced an acclaimed graphic adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

Join Nicki for a discussion and presentation about the process of creating this faithful adaptation of Fitzgerald's jazz-age classic.

Where: St Kilda Library
Date: Thursday, February 14
When: 7-8pm
Bookings: required - 92096655

This is a FREE event

Light refreshments will be supplied

A massy wheel

Here's a picture that took longer than I expected:
I'm very pleased with it, and especially happy with the perspective. I was aiming for a picture that suggested a certain depth and perspective, but whose elements were not actually "fixed" in space. In particular, I wanted some ambiguity about how near or far each wheel was to the viewer. In retrospect, this idea makes me think of Dali's Galatea of the Spheres:

Now there's a good way to feel inadequate: to view one's work next to that of Dali! Anyway, the detail was a killer, and just got more and more time-consuming. Here's my starting point, when I thought I could knock the picture over in a week:

As with the other Hamlet backgrounds, this was painted with liquid acrylic inks - my new favourite medium - on Winsor & Newton cartridge paper. Very pleased to report that my favourite paper is available once again, through the good people at The Art Shop online. Yay!

And now I'd better make up for all that time that got ground to dust between those wheels, and get back to the drawing desk!