Richard’s high spirits carrying everything before them, we all went out together to the top of the hill above the village, where he had ordered a gig to wait and where we found a man with a lantern standing at the head of the gaunt pale horse that had been harnessed to it.
Continue reading “Mr. Vholes and Richard Carstone”My favorite part of doing any kind of historical or genre art is researching the appropriate costumes. In my magazine illustration days it didn’t come up much; mostly I was drawing doctors, nurses, businessmen and contemporary kids and grownups of all kinds.
With subject matter like Dickens, costuming the characters not only correctly, but in a way that tells us about their personalities, is part of the job description!
Continue reading “Research Sketching-Costumes”
London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes–gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.
Continue reading “BLEAK HOUSE cover illustration”
Charles Dickens is probably one of the most photographed men of the mid-19th century. There are also tons of portraits, etching and paintings. I knew at some point that I would be doing a portrait of him myself. It was sort of a given. With hundreds of photos available, good reference material was not a problem. The thing is though, in those days, photography didn’t allow people to smile!
Continue reading “My Dickens Portrait”
The weather had been all the week extremely sultry, but the storm broke so suddenly—upon us, at least, in that sheltered spot—that before we reached the outskirts of the wood the thunder and lightning were frequent and the rain came plunging through the leaves as if every drop were a great leaden bead. As it was not a time for standing among trees, we ran out of the wood, and up and down the moss-grown steps which crossed the plantation-fence like two broad-staved ladders placed back to back, and made for a keeper’s lodge which was close at hand. We had often noticed the dark beauty of this lodge standing in a deep twilight of trees, and how the ivy clustered over it, and how there was a steep hollow near, where we had once seen the keeper’s dog dive down into the fern as if it were water.
Continue reading “Ada, Esther and Lady Dedlock”