The Blindness of a Beautiful Line

Hello, everyone. I hope you’re all doing well. Three months post-social media for me, and I don’t regret it. Honestly, I’m thankful I missed the social media experience of the events of the last few months - they were stressful enough offline. It took a few weeks to dry out - every time I opened a web browser my fingers would out of habit start typing T-W-I-T… It’s amazing how ingrained it had become. But now life has slowed down for me, and things that I thought were important are revealing themselves as unimportant, and I’ve been able to gain some understanding of what work I would like to be doing, and why, and also to see things that I would like to improve, to learn, to change. It has been nice to spend weeks working on learning something, making lots of rough around the edges art, writing stories that meander and twist, without having to worry that I’m not creating anything worth posting to social media. I’ve left the roller coaster of the world and wandered off into the woods for a while.

I was looking back through some boxes of sketchbooks recently, picking out some sketches for my art rep Felix Lu to sell (info on that HERE - first art sale for over a year is tomorrow, Saturday, March 13th) and aside from intensely missing the experience of going to a bar or restaurant with friends to draw, I was able to track the 8 or so years that I drew with a parallel pen and understand why I am so hesitant to draw with it now. If you’re unfamiliar with the parallel pen, I recommend checking it out if you can - it is a joy to write and draw with, it just slides across the paper, leaving a beautiful line in its wake. If you twist and turn it you get all sorts of happy accidents, lines you could never make with a normal pen - the pen surprises you with the marks it makes. (I like these sketchbooks with the parallel pen, and I prefer the largest nib size, 6mm, but there are four different sizes to play with.)

But what I found, the more that I drew with it, is that I became seduced by the line and stopped seeing what was in front of me. I let the line dictate the drawing instead of seeing what was truly in front of me. I was blinded by a beautiful line. So now I’m drawing in my sketchbook with a normal ballpoint pen, learning to see again, because that has become more important to me now than that oh so seductive calligraphic line.

I painted the cover for DARK STARS: NEW TALES OF DARKEST HORROR, edited by John F.D. Taff, for TOR/NIGHTFIRE. It was a pleasure working with Jamie Stafford-Hill on it. Back in my musician days my band National Eye was on the same label as Josh Malerman’s band THE HIGH STRUNG, and we played some shows together. Life is strange. There’s a great lineup of writers for this book, and I’m particularly excited to see Priya Sharma, a writer and friend I’ve worked with before, included.

Here’s a piece I painted for Sal Abbinanti’s THE HOSTAGE - a story about street kids trying to survive the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. More info on that book here.

I was commissioned via Felix Comic Art to do an homage to the classic British strip CAROL DAY - I loved researching this project, and spending hours studying the beautiful artwork of David Wright. Here’s a website devoted to the strip with an entire storyline you can read online.

I painted a cover for a limited edition of THE BURNING GIRLS by C. J. Tudor for Subterranean Press. A great read, and one I was happy to lose myself into. It was also nice to do a cover for a non-SFF book - I love all genres, and have never thought of myself exclusively as a SFF artist. More info on that book here.

The USA edition of NORSE TALES: STORIES FROM ACROSS THE RAINBOW BRIDGE by Kevin Crossley-Holland and I will be released later this year by Candlewick, with a new title: ACROSS THE RAINBOW BRIDGE: STORIES OF NORSE GODS AND HUMANS. Here’s the updated cover for that edition, with design by the always wonderful Ben Norland from Walker Books.

I’m still working on that picture book pitch, which is slaloming between being a picture book and a novella, and writing the script for my next graphic novel, and have done a few more book covers recently, including a cover for a new Italian edition of A MONSTER CALLS by Patrick Ness. Hopefully I can share that with you next time, as I’m quite excited about it.

I’ve been reading a lot of film books lately, and really enjoyed THE CONVERSATIONS: WALTER MURCH AND THE ART OF EDITING FILM by Michael Ondaatje. Ondaatje’s WARLIGHT was one of my favorite novels of recent times, and Murch’s work on THE CONVERSATION is a large part of why it is one of my favorite films. A fascinating book that reveals as much about the interviewer as it does the interviewee. Also, UNFORGIVEN by Edward Buscombe because, well, UNFORGIVEN.

Take care, stay healthy, hope in our hearts, vaccines in our arms.

-j