Trilemma on 34th Street

C.S. Lewis, the Narnia author and theologian, put forth the argument that logically, Christ must have been divine.  If He weren’t divine, then He was either lying or insane.  Those are our only choices.  If you don’t believe in Christ’s divinity, do you believe one of the other options is true?  Lewis called this the trilemma.

Whether or not you accept the premise, it is thought-provoking.  Is it thought-provoking enough to weave a story around?  I have a few children’s author friends who stop by here—how would they build a plot around Lewis’ argument?

First, you need an Everyman character—someone who could be influenced to believe or not believe.  Add two more characters:  one advocating for belief in His divinity, one against.  Then add Christ Himself to the mix.  Let’s set the story in the here-and-now.

Christ appears on the scene; some people believe in Him, some don’t.  Of those who don’t, some think He’s insane, and subject Him to psychoanalysis, and finally have Him committed.

Christ gets out of the insane asylum, but now He needs to prove He’s not lying—in a court of law.  His lawyer doesn’t actually succeed in proving His divinity—because there never can be such proof—but he does show that so many people do believe that there must be something to it.  That’s the best any of us can do.  That’s the nature of faith.

What a great plot!  Of course it’s the story of Miracle on 34th Street.  Santa Claus (Edmund Gwenn) stands in for Christ; the little girl (Natalie Wood) is Everyman; her mom (Maureen O’Hara who scorches the screen even in black and white) is a militant disbeliever; John Payne is a lawyer who literally advocates for belief in Santa.  Santa is psychoanalyzed, committed, and put on trial.  He’s either insane, lying—or he really is Santa Claus.

What does this have to do with a kids’ book illustration blog?  Well, this is what we kids’ book illustrators do.  Whenever I get a new manuscript to work on, it’s my job to scrutinize the story on more than one level.  Many of the stories I get won’t stand up to too much analysis; they’re meant simply to entertain.  But every story began with the germ of an idea.  If I can discern that original idea by thoroughly analyzing the story, I’ll do a better job of illustrating the book.

On the other end of the spiritual spectrum—believe it or not, I’m currently working on a children’s story that I’m pretty sure is the author’s retelling of Doctor Faustus.  Even if the author didn’t intentionally base her story on Marlowe’s masterpiece, the plot construction is so similar to Faustus that Faustus informs my visual interpretation of it.  No, no devils, no Hieronymus Bosch, but there’s a character in this story who was about to get cut—and I argued for her to stay, since she would be Helen of Troy in Doctor Faustus.  If I hadn’t read the play, I wouldn’t have realized her importance to this new story.

Happy Thanksgiving!

My friend Vince Dorse, the über-talented artist who colorized Two Bad Pilgrims, spills the secrets of his technique here.

Here’s hoping you enjoy a blessed Thanksgiving with family and friends.

You’re a mean one, Mr Grendel

Let’s face it: there’s nothing new.  We create only by standing on the shoulders of giants.  What came before is a blueprint for our every effort.  The legacy of Western culture is a valuable gift because without it, there’s hardly anything for us creatives to draw from.  The classics of literature, for instance, can become a set of toys for a talented genius to play with.

Take the epic poem Beowulf—in which ‘there lived a monster in a cave. He was a hideous beast with green fur and yellow teeth. The townspeople feared him and would never approach his cave, he in turn would never venture out to the town for he knew he was not wanted and didn’t like the people much anyhow. There was one particular day of the year that he couldn’t stand, and on this day he vowed to ruin the towsnfolk’s fun, for if he could not have any, why should they.’

It must have occurred to Dr Seuss to bend this ancient story to his own use; to retell it as a picture book.  I was thinking about the similarities between Grendel, the monster from Beowulf, and the Grinch—even down to their names.  What really struck me was the bit about how neither one could stand the sounds of civilization.

“It harrowed him / to hear the din of the loud banquet / every day in the hall, the harp being struck / and the clear song of a skilled poet / telling with mastery of a man’s beginnings, / how the Almighty had made the earth . . .” (Beowulf 34).

And:

If there’s one thing I hate…oh the noise, noise, noise, noise! …They’ll blow their flu-flubas.  They’ll bang their tartinkas.  They’ll blow their who-hubas.  They’ll bang their gardinkas!”

A quick search on Google revealed a couple of essays written about Grendel/Grinch. Here‘s one by Courtney Shay. She brings up other similarities I hadn’t thought of:  both monsters are miserable—without joy, and wreak their havoc on society in the darkness of night.

To compare Grendel to the Grinch is to appreciate how a master of the picturebook can distill an assortment of ideas down to one clear and simple storyline.

As we descend into the chaos of the season, spare a thought for the anonymous Anglo-Saxon scribbler whose poetry lives on in How The Grinch Stole Christmas!

What do I paint second?

Michael asks:

Thanks so much for posting your technique, I am currently working on my first painting and have been doing exactly what you’ve done here. i think i did do something wrong though, a friend of mine said to do a light wash over the entire piece ,but I think it just confused me. Anyhow , why do you not put more detail in the underpainting, are you modeling further with your glazes?

I’m not sure what the light wash is for, either.  I’m assuming you’re using acrylic paints, which dry to a hard finish and so allow you to paint a wash on top of them.  I use gouache, and a wash would scrub off whatever was painted underneath.  So, I start my paintings with washes and build up to opaque brushstrokes. A wash is paint made transparent by adding water.  A glaze is paint made transparent by adding a medium—for acrylic, glazing medium; for oil paint, linseed oil and varnish—or glazing medium.

I do an underpainting to block in and organize big areas of light and dark.  I long ago found out it’s too complicated for me to figure out light and dark and color all at the same time.  There’s no point in me putting lots of detail in the underpainting, because I’m only going to paint the same details on top with opaque paint.  In fact, to discourage myself from getting into details while underpainting, I use an oversized brush.

Here’s a step-by-step example of how I build up from an underpainting.  This is a continuation of a previous post, What do I paint first?

A wee spot

Here’s a fun little spot illustration I did for the Renaissance & Baroque Society of Pittsburgh, this time to promote a concert of ancient Scottish and Irish music—both sacred (church liturgy) and profane (drinking songs).  The costume is from a painting of a highland aristocrat wearing his hunting clothes.

scot

scotty

It’s never too late

Here’s a wonderful story about some overdue library books, and how the anonymous borrower redeemed his/her honor 50 years later.

The Mayflower

Another spread from Two Bad Pilgrims.  This is the big splashy first glimpse of the Mayflower.

Here is the thumbnail sketch:

pilgrim.0405

Everything’s there that needs to be, but I was concerned that the direction of the drawing didn’t show the Billingtons being rowed toward the Mayflower in the background.

In the tight sketch, I turned the foreground boat around so we’re looking at its stern as it rows away from us. I had to scan this in two pieces—sorry.

p04

p05

When I drew the tight sketch, I worked half-size, so it was fairly easy to freehand the lines of the ship.  When I inked the scene, I worked at 125%, which is pretty big.  I don’t have enough control with a brush to competently ink in those lines at the larger size.  I wound up ruling them with a rapidograph, and used a homemade french curve—I traced the ship’s line onto a piece of watercolor board and cut along the line with a razor blade.  It gave me a nice smooth template to rule the lines with.

Here’s the inked and colorized image:

p06color copy

Colorization by Vince Dorse.  Click on the picture to embiggen.

Update—Vince has some more on the colorization process over here.

Bring me the head of Johann Sebastian Bach

2bach

Awhile back, Ann Mason—then-exec-director of the Renaissance & Baroque Society of Pittsburgh—and I thought it would be screamingly funny to create a promotional bobblehead of the august Baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach.  And, by George, we were right—it is funny!

Here’s what I envisioned:

bach

One of the rbsp board members, Joy Troetschel, has some expertise in getting merchandise manufactured, and knew of a bobblehead factory in China who could produce our little statuette.  What follows are some images from the correspondence I shared with the talented sculptors who created a brilliant little 3D clay caricature of Bach from the sketches I sent.

Bach Head Clay 1

Bach Head Clay 2

Bach Head Clay 3

Bach Head Clay 4

Bach Body Clay 6

And here’s the prototype.  They even airbrushed a nice 5 o’clock shadow onto JSB’s cheeks!

Bach Colour Revision 3

If you’d like one of these timeless treasures, visit the rbsp website—they’re modestly priced and benefit the Society.

Five not-too-bad cover ideas

People do judge a book by its cover.  Or at least, it’s the cover that gets people to pick up the book in the bookstore and see whether they like it.  Here are rough cover ideas for Two Bad Pilgrims.

cover1

coverA

coverB

coverC

coverD

Art Director Jim Hoover liked Idea A  I did tight sketches of the boys, the New Worlde mappe and the title type, which Jim put together as a comp.

pilg.cover_comp-1

pilg.covertype

pilg.covermap

The boys and the map are painted as a single image.  One last request: show the boys having burst through the map.  The compass rose is a separate piece of art.  The type I inked in as separate black & white art.  Jim Hoover combined these elements into one cover image and added the credits at the bottom.

511VudukEWL._SS500_

Samoset

The costume color indication for Samoset, for Two Bad Pilgrims.  Not that there’s much costume.  Samoset walked into Plymouth Plantation in the middle of March wearing hardly anything at all.  He was showing the pilgrims he had no concealed weapons.  He was being theatrical and used symbolism to communicate: as ambassador from Chief Massasoit, he wanted to express goodwill to the pilgrims and he mustn’t have trusted his broken English.  The Wampanoags wanted to know whether the pilgrims were peaceful, so Samoset carried two arrows, one with an arrowhead and the other blunt.

samoset.color

How would you walk into a potential enemy’s camp and ask about their intentions—while not knowing their language?