Under the weather

I've been a bit under the weather recently. I don't think it was the rain at the Calstock Bike Show because I was in the tents and enjoying the company and facilities. (See the Engine Punk blog for more on that if you're into pedestrians aquaplaning.) But it was there that I noticed that I hard a sore throat and here I am, a fortnight later, having had some days off work and with the tail end of a persistent cold to get rid of.

I have the feeling that I've made the most of the rotten weather. First there was the website re-vamp (indoors work) and more recently there's been the re-design of my book covers (more indoors work). Meanwhile, motorsport events and traction engine rallies have been cancelled and farming friends are going to have to pickle their corn crop with acid because it's so damp has little prospect of drying out.

But here's a re-vamp of the cover for The Horsepower Whisperer. The jury is still out on the white space around the illustration but for the moment I like it. The drawing will change but I feel good about the new layout. This has taken a great deal of thought. Maybe it was the drugs - the Tixylix and the Lemsip. Perhaps they altered my perceptions. Maybe it was sniffing my marker pens. Whatever - the go faster stripes are less dominant and better use is made of the available space to give an idea of what sort of story can be expected inside. It keeps the kind of corporate look that I want, too, with a couple of visual references to the website. The viewpoint in the drawing will come down a bit so that the gremlin is more in Hob's line of sight. Hob will also take up more room in the drawing. There's too much irrelevant stuff around him and getting rid of it should add to the impact of the book cover.

Having the snots delayed proceedings rather more than I would have liked. Although I was at home I slept a lot during the day. This was in addition to sleeping during the night, which was a bit more unusual because sometimes I have nocturnal habits. Anyway, sneezing and dripping all over artwork proved counter productive and now I'm back with all sorts of media - oils, water coolers, gouache, inks (I'd never tried inks before), pastels, biros, pencils and spirit markers.

As well as finding out some home truths about my pictorial orientation (I'm landscape and not portrait), I have also discovered that there are more differences between being an illustrator and being an industrial designer.

An illustrator illustrates and a designer designs. Nobody has seen what the designer has designed before. Only when he's drawn it is it revealed. Everybody's seen what an illustrator illustrates before he's even sharpened his pencil and have their own views on what a giant lamb should look like. With one you can bluff but with the other you can't. When an industrial designer (me frinstance) attempts to depict scenes of an agricultural revolutionary nature, you have to do a lot more preparatory work.

Not only that - an industrial designer only draw one thing at a time. An illustrator draws several together and they've all got to lie in the right plane and reflect a certain amount of light off each other. Some of the subjects might even be people.

At the moment it feels like individual elements work really well but don't work so well together. The sum of the parts doesn't quite add up.

That's what it's been quite handy having all this rotten weather. If it was sunny I'd be outside mending leaky roofs instead of wrestling with all this paper. My hands would be oily from the garage and various mechanical adventures an I'd get grubby paw prints on my hitherto pristine artwork. And, yes, I did consider oily finger marks as graphic devices for my new covers but, again, the results were not quite what I expected.

In a round about way, I suppose I'm trying to make an excuse for not finishing my new cover artwork for The Wormton Lamb but how good at you drawing anyway? When was the last time you tried to produce a book cover? Well, then. You can shut up.

The portrait/landscape thing is still difficult for me. I sit at a table, which is wider than it is deep. I feel that and easel might be better. It would allow me to see the whole picture and not something that tapers away from me.

I even considered making my book landscape in format but only fleetingly. I don't want to have to re-typeset it. Landscape format books don't sit comfortably in my hands. I have landscape format eyes but - like most people - have portrait format hands.

Or rather, they're portrait format hands when they pick up a book. Let them get hold of a pencil or a paint brush and they go all landscape on me again.

Here's how The Wormton Lamb looks so far. I remain content with the white space around it again. I've used earlier illustrations to rough it out but the lamb's not right. It doesn't dominate the scene enough and I reckon it's dislocated a shoulder as well. My latest drawing - it's still wet and too big for my old trusty A4 scanner - is better. The cars are proportionally smaller and the lamb much bigger. I'm still finalising some of the colours. I even went so far as to search for the right complementary colours on the internet and devised a palette of colours that were comfortable with each other. True to form, after all that colour preparation I've ignored it and done my own thing.

The size of my artwork has also grown. I am now steadily working my way through an A3 pad and have ordered an A3 scanner. The idea is that once my original picture is shrunk down to Royale size (156mm x 234mm) then any embarrassing smudges won't be noticeable.

Anyone who sees my book covers but hasn't read this blog will think I'm a creative genius and not someone who's been drawing at right angles to what he finds comfortable.

We'll see what Beck at RedSnapper reckons to these changes.

Are you a portrait or landscape person?

I am a landscape person. I have discovered this during the work on my new book covers. The original drawings were all in landscape format so when I came to incorporate them into my cover designs there was a lot of white space above and below.

I started off liking the crisp white space but have realised that the original drawings limited the cover design and didn't make the best use of space. I am now trying to become a portrait person.

After years of drawing cars and motorbikes that are longer than they are tall, it's difficult to adapt. I'm also having to get used to the idea that there should be plenty of blank illustration where the text can go. But the text should flow naturally around the illustrated action. Because I don't know where the text is going to go, I don't know where action needs to be and where to put the vacant spaces. It's not a question of the chicken and the egg - it's a re-iterative process until you have the chicken and the egg beside each other. And the text snugly nested with my drorin.

Ah yes, colour. I am a monochrome landscape sort of chap. I haven't time for this colouring in lark. At least I didn't until now. Now I want my book covers to be vibrant and lively, rather than a neat pen drawing or a scratchy pencil sketch. Consequently I'm dabbling with oil paints. Even if the dawbs of colour don't work out straight away, I can paint over them when they're dry (difficult with water colours and ink). And the texture and smell is great.