A new illustrated edition of Charles Dickens' great BLEAK HOUSE
“Spot Illos”
So in doing magazine and book illustration for a few decades, I picked up a couple of technical terms. For example, an illustration is called an “illo”, a sketch is called a “ruff”, and a deadline is called a “#!!@! deadline”.
Illos done for print are termed by their size, and from biggest to smallest are called a spread, full-page, half-page, quarter page, and spot. Spots are fun because they are usually simple, a quick visual read, and they don’t necessarily have to carry as much narrative weight as a full-page does.
For BLEAK HOUSE the spots are relatively quick to do as they don’t require the historical research that a bigger image does. Here is a gallery of a few of the spots I’ve completed, some with sketches to show how they progress from “ruff” to “spot”. I know it sounds like I’m running a kennel but I’m not!
In this series of sketches, the lawyer “Conversation Kenge” first meets with young Esther.The irrepressible Mrs. Jellyby and her daughter Caddy. I enjoyed drawing this one, as the description is so vivid and detailed, yet I still felt free to add my own numerous details. Mrs. Jellyby’s attention is entirely fixed on Africa, to the utter neglect of her home, husband and family.
Well, maybe these two above examples are a bit more developed than my definition of a spot illo. Here are a couple that fit the bill a little better:
“Chancery” is the term for the British legal system which is the true villain of this story. Dickens characterizes Chancery as “…between the registrar’s red table and the silk gowns, with bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, references to masters, masters’ reports, mountains of costly nonsense, piled before them.” This image of an endless stack of documents, with headstones scattered at its base, epitomized the waste and redundancy.Richard listens while Ada play the piano by firelight. The challenge here was to render the cast shadows by suggesting flickering firelight, while also suggesting that Ada’s shadow is turned to face Richard.
I worked as a commercial illustrator in the New York market for over 40 years, creating work for such clients as The New Republic, Forbes, Parents, Prevention Magazine, Consumer Reports, Publishers Weekly, Institutional Investor, Black Enterprise, MAD, CBS, American Express, and others.
I spent the last fifteen years of my career creating litigation graphics, i.e., anything a lawyer may need to present in court, including video editing, animation, interactive graphics, text screens, and illustration. I worked on many cases that you read about in the papers assuming you were reading papers fifteen years ago!
I'm also a longtime Charles Dickens fan and spent five years illustrating his great BLEAK HOUSE with 40 new linoleum cut graphics. I've done linoleum printing demonstrations in bookstores, was an invited speaker at the University of London's "Dickens Day" in 2025, and will be teaching a week-long linoleum printing class at The Dickens Universe at UC Santa Cruz in July 2026.
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