The Wild Swans, an interactive revisioning

A recent blog post by Tor Publishing on modern retellings of the fairy tale,  The Wild Swans, reminded me of my own reworking of this tale as a piece of interactive art. It was part of my show Rumpelstiltskin's Cupboard: Interactive Fairytale Art.

The Wild Swans, acrylic on wooden pool cue box, 5 x 42 ½ x 3 ½"

This is a story about a princess who has twelve brothers who have been turned into wild swans.  It is up to her to release them from enchantment by weaving twelve shirts out of nettles and getting the swans to wear them so they can turn back into men.  Remember that nettles are poisonous and cause your skin to painfully blister and rash if you accidentally touch them.  

I really liked this story when I was a little because the girl was so heroic and the picture of wild swans so romantic.  I had lots of fantasies of suffering tortures to rescue someone I loved.  Now in thinking it over, I would say that this tale is a perfect example of the Patient Griselda theme, so-called after the story of that name by Boccaccio in the Decameron.  Griselda exemplifies the perfect wife because of her capacity for endless, uncomplaining devotion.   That is, the perfect woman is the perfect martyr and masochist and will never complain, no matter how punishing the demands of her husband/father/wild swan brothers are.  She obeys and never questions because her love is so great.

Another great theme in this story is the age-old idea that women are responsible for taming the wildness out of men.  In recent years the British press has hauled out experts who claim that by getting pregnant but refusing to share their council flats with the lager-swilling, unemployed dads, young women are causing the downfall of society.  They are shirking their female duty to marry and thereby teach responsibility and good manners to young men.

  "Why should I?  He just lies about all day watching telly.  He steals money from my purse to go out drinking with the lads all night and then gets violent with me and the kids."   So the editorials in the Telegraph, Times, and Evening Standard were blaming the girls for the immature behaviour of young men.

This is why this piece is in a pool cue box.  Because the pool hall is one of the traditional hangouts of young men up to no good.

I had a few practical problems with the subject:  I know nettles are green, but green shirts looked so horrible on the swans in the night sky that I pretended to myself that they'd dried to a nice gold colour like ripe wheat.  I also sat there pondering how the swans could get their wings through the sleeves in mid-air, or if the shirts would blow off if they were just draped over the swans.  Then I told myself, "Stupid!  It's magic.  The shirts will just melt onto their bodies."

UNLOCK THE HOOK ON THE TOP AND GENTLY LOWER THE LID.  SNAP INTO PLACE.  PLEASE RETURN LID TO ORIGINAL POSITION FOR THE NEXT PERSON.

My latest animation

Thank you to Caroline Adderson and Groundwood Books for hiring Rascal Media, my children's media company, to make a trailer for Caroline's wonderful, funny middle-grade novel. It was a joy to read and then interpret with animation.

National Post video review of Got to Go

Thank you to Mark Medley of the National Post for his thoughtful and generous video review of Mister Got to Go Where Are you? (2nd in the video). And congratulations to my friends at Tradewind for a great review of Pierre Pratt and Kari Lynn Winters's No Matter What Friends.

Book Launch at the Sylvia Hotel!

Please come for the launch of  

Mister Got to Go, Where Are You?

at the Sylvia Hotel on

Saturday, June 21, 2014, 2-4 pm

Illustrating neon in watercolour - cool trick

I recently went to the launch of the lovely Dream Boats by Kirsti Wakelin and Dan Bar-el. Kirsti's tour de force illustration was at once a display of fabulous traditional art skills and techie brilliance. After the presentation, I cornered her so I could point at different mystifying sections of her illustrations and ask "how the heck did you do that?...and that?...and that?" When she explained how she managed to do dozens of stars in an indigo sky which all gradated perfectly from pure white to midnight blue, fireworks went off in my cerebral cortex. She'd painted black ink dots on wet paper, scanned in the art, opened it in photoshop, and inverted the image to its negative (command i). I hugged myself with joy and scurried home, chuckling like a happy madwoman. I'd been painting one lousy version after another of a spot illustration of Mr. Got To Go crossing Vancouver's theatre row. I had been growing increasingly frustrated by the impossibility of doing the neon marquees in watercolour. After a few tests to figure out what would be the negative colours and tonal values of what I wanted the illustration to end up being, I painted this ugly watercolour, scanned it in, then hit command i in photoshop. After a little judicious cleanup, here's the result. Are you not amazed, impressed? Is not that cool? Thank you clever, clever Kirsti Wakelin!

cover for Mr Got to Go Where Are You?

I'm in the final stretch of illustrating the 3rd Mr Got to Go book. After back-and-forthing with editor, Peter Carver; publisher, Richard Dionne; and author, Lois Simmie, we agreed on what the image should be. Publishers generally like a lot of control with the cover because it's the main marketing tool for the book, so it means creating a number of sketches (in this case, photo-composite "sketches"), and a lot of discussion. Yesterday, I drew the final line. The stages to get to the final line were: creating photo composites of settings and cats; deciding which to go with; doing a rough drawing from the one Peter Carver liked the best (fortunately this was also my favourite. It was a pleasant surprised that he chose it unprompted.) Then the rough drawing is scanned into the computer so I can spend a few hours monkeying around in photoshop with the relative size of the cat to background, moving things around to leave room for the designer's text, and cleanup. Then that gets printed out nice and dark on ordinary bond paper to be traced onto good watercolour paper on the light table. My preferred illustration paper is Bockingford 140 lb. The colour looks great on it and it's very forgiving - you can lift off colour easily and even scrub off whole sections with a natural sponge. Then comes the precise part of the job of carefully drawing the details and trying to breathe life into the figure of Mr Got to Go. Sometimes I will do the final line right in photoshop, then print it directly onto 90 lb watercolour paper using my creaky, tempermental HP Deskjet 1220 C. It can take paper up to 13.5 inches wide and sometimes likes watercolour paper if I feed the deckle edge first, cross my fingers, and pray, beg, and curse. But final line work done on the computer can be too perfect and a little stiff. It's important that this cover be as human and emotional as possible. This is the simplest Got to Go cover of the three - only one character and very little factual detail to adhere to. Today, I'll be painting. Key tricky bits are creating liquid living eyes, manipulating the background colour to spotlight the grey cat - on ongoing illustration challenge in this series has been that the hero is small and grey - and all the reflections, shadows, and gleaming lights.

I want to go to the Moon!

I Want to Go to the Moon is a picture book based on a delightful song by singer/songwriter Tom Saunders. I met Tom at the Vancouver Ukulele Circle and instantly became a big fan of his performances. Later, I discovered that he cowrote all the theme music for the television series, Robson Arms. When Tom gave me a CD of children's music that he recorded I couldn't believe my ears. This was tiptop Canadian children's music. I asked him if I could do some sketches and pitch one of the songs as the basis for a picture book. Simply Read agreed to publish it. The art has just been completed and sent off to be scanned and designed by genius designer and illustrator Elisa Gutierrez. It's due out September 11, 2010. The cover on Amazon was the first one I did before I'd done the illustrations. The art above is a 2nd cover Elisa asked me to do to be more consistent with the finished interior art.