art materials – Gerry Mooney Illustrating Dickens

The Dickens Universe Heats Up!

First I would like to thank those of you who have contributed to my GoFundMe campaign. I’ve already begun making lists, and buying paper, supplies and equipment for this adventure, and the lists keep growing!

I know folks have reservations about contributing money online, and maybe some folks just dislike GoFundMe and their ilk, and I understand. I would like you to know that if you want to help me in this endeavor, I can also accept money through the following methods, which don’t take a fee out of the donations.

Barnes & Noble Lino Demonstration – VIDEO

The B&N store on 71st St. in Tulsa was kind enough to allow me to hold my second book signing/lino printing demonstration on Saturday, Sept. 11 and it went just fine!

Several friends showed up and I even snagged a couple of new fans among the passing customers. Special big thanks to Vicki’s longtime friend Marty Sikes for handling the camera duties on the spur of the moment.

Book signing and Linoleum Printing Demonstration

Promotional poster for a book signing event with Gerry Mooney, illustrator of Charles Dickens' Bleak House, featuring details about a linoleum block printing demonstration at Barnes & Noble, Tulsa, on September 13, 2025.

If you’re in the Tulsa area it would be great to see you at my second book signing and lino print demonstration, 1PM on Saturday, Sept. 13.

The Barnes & Noble Store is across from Woodland Hills Mall on 71st St., and the store staff has offered to help me live-stream the event on Facebook, so there’s an opportunity to watch right from your couch!

In other news, I expect to be traveling to London in October to speak at Dickens Day at the University of London. I’ll have more info about this soon.

Today’s Linocut Artists

I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at the work of other linoleum artists. The fact is that since I seek out and view so much art on Facebook, my feed these days is almost exclusively art of various types, from Golden Age comic art to Disney animation, character sketching, political cartoons, Renaissance work, cave paintings, you name it. And I like it fine!

What has really grabbed my attention of course is the work of other linoleum artists, which I find utterly humbling. I’m very happy with the work I do, but in essence my pieces are a single image printed in black ink on white paper, and if you’ve read my posts on my “Christmas Carol” experiments, you know I struggle with anything more complex.

How “A Christmas Carol” Ends

Man, I really didn’t want to write this post. I had big plans, as I wrote about in my post of Sept. 10. Create a set of charming scenes from Charles Dickens’s holiday classic as three-color linoleum prints, and do it in time to sell them for this Christmas season in my Etsy shop, which I set up primarily to try selling some of my BLEAK HOUSE prints. Ambitious but doable, I thought.

It actually started out very well. I developed my sketches into imagery that I was very happy with. I enjoyed designing the lettering with a loose but classical sort of letterform, and of course thinking about and drawing the characters was a lot of fun. I was making good progress! The key factor was time, since I was starting maybe a little late for the holidays, due to the complexity and somewhat experimental nature of the project.

A Christmas Carol

I recently started an Etsy shop (since closed!) to offer prints of a couple of my BLEAK HOUSE illustrations. I’ve done a soft launch but the fact is my offerings so far are pretty slim. I know a couple of images I’ve done for this project have a broader appeal, but growing a shop like this based on what I’ve done for this one book has some problems. So as I said, a soft launch just to get some feedback, but it is certainly off to a slow start. It would be nice to have something special to offer for Christmas.

I love “A Christmas Carol” as much as anyone, but mostly the movies (Mr. Magoo is my favorite!). I hadn’t read the text for a long time, but recently I read it again as a way to refresh my Dickens knowledge. I pretty quickly felt moved to do some sketching, in a way that movies do not inspire me. Interesting!

“The Last Picture” Show

As promised in my previous post, I’ve completed a “making of” video of the final large illustration for my BLEAK HOUSE project. It’s not the last chronologically in the book, just the last one to get to. In fact there are two more small, or “spot” illustrations still to do, and those I can do in a few days or a week at most.

The larger ones take more time to work out a more elaborate composition, and can take a month. Shooting a video while doing this work adds a great deal to to process, and of course cutting and editing a video can be time consuming, but I hope the results are worth your time.

A “making of” video in the works

Hi folks, I know it’s been awhile since I’ve posted, and the last post was about a rare but serious creative block. The thing about blocks is, eventually, they just go away and you start plowing back into it.

I’ve been working on this BLEAK HOUSE illustration project non-stop since Spring of 2019. Enormous and all-consuming as it is, I’ve never lost the spark that has moved me so in this sprawling work.

Gustave Doré – Jan. 6, 1832-Jan. 23, 1883

In researching and reading about the art and business of woodcut illustration in the 19th Century, it is almost inevitable to end up with Gustave Doré. More than a master draftsman or illustrator, he possessed a practically supernatural ability to simply draw. He was recognized as a prodigy at age five, was carving in stone at twelve, and by fifteen he was supporting his family by drawing caricatures for French magazine Le journal pour rire.

Although Dickens and Doré never met as far as I can determine, their lifespans overlapped, Dickens being born in 1812 and Doré in 1832. And while Dickens labored in the world of British popular fiction and monthly magazines, the French Doré was producing high-quality illustrated art volumes of what we would call “The Great Books”, e.g., Voltaire, Rabelais, Cervantes, the Bible, Paradise Lost, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and many, many others, much of it for a British audience.

Inspector Bucket

It has been said that Inspector Bucket, the police detective in BLEAK HOUSE, was the very first fictional detective, pre-dating Sherlock Holmes among others. I don’t know about that, but I do love this great Dickens character!

It’s tempting to compare him to others of the genre, and I often think of Columbo for some reason, but that’s not even close. Bucket is not rumpled and never feigns confusion, but the attribute they share is a totally disarming likability. Bucket’s greatest skill as an investigator is instantly being everyone’s best friend and confidante. He can speak to little children, Lords and Ladies, or street sweepers, and within a sentence or two bond with them like an old friend.