Illustration Notes for Episode Twenty

This week’s illustration proved problematic for me in several ways. First—I found myself with very little time to create it. My wife and I spent four days last week at a writer’s retreat in Port Townsend, WA. It was a very enjoyable time, and I got some good writing done, but it cut significantly into the time I had for other work—like art production. The week was further crowded by other illustration jobs, and some not insignificant mental distraction around watching nearly a dozen of our California relatives navigate this year’s rampant wildfires and power outages close-up! Some amazing stories there—but they’re not about this illustration, so I’ll leave it there. And, finally, the fact that this week’s written content proved longer and more challenging than usual meant that most of my time was consumed in writing, not art, this week. All of which is to say that this turned into one of those times when something more on the ‘quick sketch’ rather than ‘elaborate scene’ end of the scale was needed.

We’ve had so many pictures of the flood already that I opted not to do another one. The other most interesting element of this episode seemed to be the…er…’phantasm’…that appears at the episode’s end. But here I ran into a ‘perfect storm’ of any illustrator’s perennial problems: the wild ambitions of unbridled imagination vs. the tight constraints of production time and ‘resources,’ and the frequent quarrel between ‘what’s actually described in the writing’ and what will ‘work’ as a cover image.

Not only did I find myself short of the time and mental resources needed to invent and render the elaborately beautiful and exotic creature imagined in the written scene, but—as so often happens to those attempting translation of five-dimensional mental visions into two-dimensional, static, visual ones—one aspect of what I saw in my head kept undoing another. The flood water described in the written episode is an almost opaque chocolate stew, in which the strange presence appears to Dusty as a phosphorescent woman with large, dark eyes, sparkling skin and purple ‘kelp-like’ hair. But she also shifts constantly in appearance between ‘woman’ and ‘fish.’ Yet, under water, human vision is quite ‘blurry’ without mask or goggles to separate our corneas from the liquid we’re looking through. So—what—exactly—would this ‘apparition’ look like in a single-frame image capturing only one instant of its appearance? Would Dusty see her clearly at all through such opaque rushing mud? (No! Yet he does, and—as you will see later in the story—there is a reason for that which has nothing to do with physical vision.) But even allowing for that, would the image he saw be sharp and detailed or blurry and obscured? And how would ‘color’ function in such a ‘lighting environment? What does ‘purple’ end up looking like lit by inner phosphorescence through muddy water?

The WRITER answers all of these questions easily. But reducing them ‘accurately’ to an actual visual image is much harder. I tried making her look ‘blurry and obscured’ at first—which looked great until I tried to add the line work that is signature to this serial’s art style. That really didn’t work. So I made her image sharper, and started trying to add the purple hair and sparkly skin—and suddenly she didn’t look ‘under murky water’ at all. She looked like an apparition floating in clear air… Be true to one aspect of what ‘the writer’ describes, and violate another. This is why real publishers rarely let their illustrators have any contact with their authors. In my case, separating them was not an option—so, predictably, they began to quarrel:

“Hey! You’re not drawing what I wrote!”

“Well if you’d write something sensible, I’d draw it.”

“What I wrote is completely sensible! He’s just seeing it with his mind, not his physical eyes!”

“Well everyone I’m drawing for has only physical eyes to see it with, fool. So how am I supposed…”

At some point, I simply ran out of time to keep fighting with it—and settled for the faster, easier sketch you see: her ‘woman’ state, in ‘watery’ colors (if not very ‘muddy’ ones—’cause who’s gonna want to look at those, really?). More a ‘sense’ of the event than an ‘accurate record’ of it. And even then, I had to struggle with how bright and saturated to make the image. In the end, I chose a ‘dimmer, murkier’ version than the brighter, more saturated one that would have ‘popped’ more, but looked less ‘dim, mysterious and 'emerging from the underwater-dark’—to me, at least. I have enclosed both versions below, so you can decide for yourself whether I made a good decision.

Some times we illustrators shine—and sometimes we just struggle toward ‘adequate.’ :] Alas.