Illustration in Response to the Written Word Literal Illustration

Project Two

Weeks 3 and 4

The Brief:

• 1 full bleed illustration, 160x226mm, CMYK (300 dpi)
• 1 chapter heading illustration, 105x50mm, greyscale (300 dpi)

Based on the story "A View from a Hill" by M. R. James published in 1931

click here for story

A very very brief synopsis of the story is; Richards buys some binoculars from Baxter and lends them to Fanshawe and when Fanshawe looks through them he is able to see things that are no longer there like gallows and crowds up on a hill and a tower in a village that is no longer there. Richards servant has stories to tell about Baxter being suspicious but Fanshawe wants to go to the village and the hill to see if what he thought he saw was really there, it wasn't. He tried to used the binoculars to read something in the church but couldn't see though them so concluded that they must not work inside. On gallows hill there is only woods and as he walks through he feels like he's being watched and chased and he feels a hand on his shoulder. He stumbles upon three large stones that he finds suspicious and he avoids them, eventually getting back to Richards place at 9 o clock. The servant then tells his story about Baxter boiling down bones and making a mask from part of a skull and eventually one night leaving his shop and speaking in a voice that didn't belong to him. He disappears and is later found between the three stones on Gallows hill with a broken neck. Richards and Fanshawe try to use the binoculars once again the next morning and discover that neither of them can see through them. Fanshawe drops them and they crack and a black, smelly liquid oozes out. Its pieced together that the men hung on gallows hill were dumped on the stones and Baxter had been and stolen their bones and boiled them in a pot. He put this liquid into the binoculars to "see through a dead mans eyes" but the spirits felt extremely disrespected by his actions and killed Baxter. 

I also watched the BBC adaptation of the story - unfortunately they changed it quite a bit and seemed to focus on things that didn't feel quite so significant in the original story but it was still helpful to see an interpretation of it and how they chose to show certain elements of the story. This definitely is a more dramatic "ghosty" take on things but seeing the locations and sets was definitely useful.

This is my very initial ideas I took down just to gather my thoughts and get me going and as you can see I very quickly decided that the chapter header could look amazing done as a lino print so I then went onto Instagram to have a look at some line prints of a similar ~vibe~

Research and Inspiration

While looking about at lino prints I stumbled upon this absolute beauty with the orange background and it got me thinking because I thought initially that I would just do the chapter header as a print and do a completely separate illustration for the full page. Why would I think that? Who knows, but tying it all together by doing both as lino prints seems like a pretty good idea to me. 
Like this orange one, I'm thinking I can paint a background and print on top of it - I know this one has been done with two lino prints but I think I can better get what I'm looking for with a painted background and a print on top anyway... just need to figure out what I'm actually looking for but that shouldn't be too much of an issue. 
I'm really excited about doing this project because the story I'm illustrating has loads of good material to pick from and I really love doing lino prints but I haven't done one in so long - I think the look the lino print will give me will suit it perfectly. 

I also collected some pictures of various time-appropriate things that I feel like will be helpful to me.

Thumbnails and Ideas

With the full page illustration since I'll be printing black ink onto coloured backgrounds I think I'll try a few versions out, like one with the colours as expected and then some printed onto a gradient background. 
It took me quite a while to arrive on an idea that I felt would work for the full illustration, I wanted to do it so that we were close up in the crowd with the horse and cart because I thought the detail in that on lino print would be really beautiful but it just didn't feel right and I couldn't get the composition to work how I wanted so I took a step back, almost in a literal sense and went back to the story. When Fanshawe sees this scene he's looking through the binoculars from a fair distance away after all so I went back to the idea of being far away from the scene and I got something I was finally happy with.
In terms of the chapter header it didn't take me long to design something I was happy with. I constantly went back and tweaked it and tried slightly different things out but ultimately the idea was there pretty quickly and I'm really happy with it. I briefly wrote it on one of my thumbnails but when I read books as a kid I loved the mystery of a chapter header. I loved when they seemed so obscure and you couldn't understand what it meant until you got to that point in the story so that's what I wanted to create with this.

Process

After waiting around all day for my Amazon delivery, I'm ready to get going on producing my stamps. I'm so excited to get going and just spend some time listening to music and cutting away at the lino :)

Here's my first lino cut and my three first prints. Print 3 is definitely really close to what I had imagined while I was thumbnailing so I'm very happy about that. I will admit that there was blood lost over this print but has anyone ever done a lino cut without shoving the blade into your finger at some point? 

Clare Leighton

I had a look at some of Claire Leightons work because its got the sort of look I'm going for and a similar process, hers are etchings but it still applies well for what I'm doing and I like the way she handles the perspective of the scene and that something I want to be considering in my piece. 

Its a shame that my best thumbnails and the ones I'm taking forward are so small but that's just how it goes sometimes. I'm deciding to have the horse right in the foreground to get some really nice detail in there with the print and to really break the composition up. The horse and cart takes up half of the frame within a diagonal line from the top right to bottom left corner. This composition was a suggestion from Dwayne and once I tried it out I really like it. Dwayne emphasised that this piece isn't being used to communicate information or a deep message so its aesthetic value is really important and this is definitely going to make it look really great. 

Outcomes

That took so much longer than I had anticipated. This is definitely the messiest project I've done so far, thanks to the giant pile of lino shavings, the spilled ink and the dozen failed prints. I can't pretend like it wasn't fun though; below are the results. 

Chapter Header

I photoshopped the header print onto some book paper for that authentic™ look. I think it's really cute - as cute as a spilled pot of bones and water can be I suppose. I initially thought I wanted to redo this print but this one really grew on me and especially after cleaning it up a little in photoshop I'm really happy with it. 

Full Illustration

This print took me a couple of days to finish cutting and it was heart breaking when I just couldn't get a good print of it. I think the ink I bought wasn't exactly up to the quality it said it was so I REALLY struggled to get a good clean print. This was my best one and I still had to clean it up in photoshop but I had to keep reminding myself that this is the exact reason I wanted to do a lino print in the first place and the imperfections are part of the charm of the piece. 
Since I struggled to get good prints I didn't print onto coloured backgrounds like I thought I would because it was just too unpredictable so I used the magic of photoshop to do that for me and as you can see I tried a few things out that I had wanted to do with actual backgrounds. The orange was a fluke because I was thinking back to one of the pieces that really inspired me and I loved the orange colour used so I tried it and with the white highlights I really love it. 
In feedback it was suggested I put a paper texture on the finished piece so there's two different versions of that and I think they look a lot better than it did without it. 

Just to finish off, I made a version of the header that matches the final illustration that I'm happy with just to see what it would look like and I think it's pretty cool!

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