Ash Dieback.

M.R. James, The Ash Tree.

It's not my favourite of the James pieces I've done but it's the one where I've managed to give myself the creeps.

All Mouth.

More M.R. James. Poor afflicted Mr Dunning passes an unsettled night.

"The obvious course was to find a match, and also to consult his watch: he might as well know how many hours of discomfort awaited him. So he put his hand into the well-known nook under the pillow: only, it did not get so far. What he touched was, according to his account, a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it, and, he declares, not the mouth of a human being."

 

Now, if you want to extrapolate any sort of Freudian interpretation of the fear of a mouth with teeth and hair all about it, that is of course your prerogative as an independent reader.

American Robotic

'American Robotic', pencil on A3 paper, 15cm x 18cm.

Building.

Started this with some extravagant ideas in mind of filling in under Mr Waits with portraits of characters - Edna Million in a drop-dead suit, Jack the Cutter and the Pockmark Kid, Birdy Joe Hoaks and the like, but it stalled before I finished his hat. 

Lord Bunn then posted some beautifully ornate lettering work in progress on Twitter, and the lights went on again. 

Pencil, all pencil. A3 paper.

Lunch Break

When they built the highest building yet, they found odd things up there. Odd but friendly.

Lunch Break, pencil on paper, 16cm x 20cm, on A3.

Whole Lotta Glove

In June the Forbidden Planet blog organised a riposte to an assertion made in a national newspaper that there weren't any good illustrators any more, illustrators who could actually draw stuff that looked like the stuff they were drawing. The challenge was to draw a cover for either 'Catcher in the Rye' or 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist.' 

I opted for 'Catcher' and read it through again. I was a long way down the moody-kid-in-red-check-cap road before it occurred to me that it wasn't all that imaginative a response.

In the end I picked up on the root of Holden's 'catcher' image, his brother Allie's catching mitt, which had poems written on it in green ink.

I don't know what happened to the competition, it was supposed to be whittled down to a shortlist in July, and then August and now it's December in a couple of days, so although we were asked not to publicise our own work, I'm assuming it's all got lost down the back of a drawer somewhere.

So, this is what I did.

I made it by drawing the glove and experimenting with green ink in a dip nib to get an authentically handwritten effect, then scanning in glove and writing separately and combining them in layers.

Wolf

Chester Burnett, aka Bigfoot Chester, aka the mighty Howlin' Wolf.

A monstrous vocal and physical presence, standing at six feet three, nearly twenty stones in his prime and wearer of size seventeen shoes, Chester was a big man in all senses.