Following on from my previous blog about using old pictures to illustrate your book, I finally came to designing the cover.
I’ve had various ideas for the cover for a while. A friend of mine is a model and I at first considered adapting a photograph of her, as follows:
I finally came up with this.
However, I wasn’t convinced by this, and felt the image was in some way cluttered. What’s more, with the illustrations inside the book now decided upon, I wanted some drawn artwork.
I went back to the Bible I had been using earlier, but the Witch of Endor was portrayed as an old hag, not the young woman in my story.
So, back to the book collection, which includes a thick, heavy volume from 1894 called “PEN DRAWING AND PEN DRAUGHTSMEN: THEIR WORK AND THEIR METHODS A STUDY OF THE ART TO-DAY WITH TECHNICAL SUGGESTIONS”.
Leafing through the images, I found this:
The figure of the woman, drawn by A Montalti, was perfect, though there was a lot of image around her to lose.
Eventually, I got to this.
Still stark, I thought.
After some experiments with colour, I came to this:
This is the one. Subtle, mysterious and eyecatching. I now have my cover!
Part 2 includes a section in which a wild wolf runs loose. This image seemed appropriate:
Part 3 comes to the crux of the story, and includes a narrative about the ancient archetype Lilith, who in Jewish mythology was Adam’s first wife before the unfortunate Eve. This seemed perfect:
Finally, we have an Epilogue. The image of the Phoenix from the bible seemed appropriate enough!
Scanning the 250 year 0ld images has been quite an education. Only once you start to manipulate the image and blow it up, do you see the extraordinary detail of the original craftsman, who scratched the image in reverse on to a copper plate with a steel stylus. The physical strength, endurance and patience it took is humbling for a 21st Century man who often ends up cursing Adobe Photoshop.
Anyone who knows me knows I’m a sucker for the circus, so when I saw Cirque de Glace were performing at the King’s Theatre, I couldn’t resist going. I LOVE CIRCUSES, and this was one with a difference. The whole thing was a circus on ice, with a real refrigerated floor for the performers to skate around on! How would they do it? I wondered, how would the circus motif be transformed with this added frisson, or freeze-on, of a potential slip-up at any moment?
For many people, filming or recording a talk has become the simple way to keep notes, rather than do that laborious and oh-so-hard exercise of lifting up a pen. But it is not all right, and I will tell you why.
Another cultural event was the final instalment of The Sign of Six – a deeply joyous homage to one of Portsmouth’s great literary heroes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the character who is so famous I am sure he is even recognised in far-flung galaxies across the universe, Sherlock Holmes (and of course, his bosom buddy Doctor Watson!).