I'm thrilled to join the blog tour for Proud, the fantastic anthology of short stories, poetry and illustrations by authors and artists that identify as part of the LBBTQ+ community. You can read my 5-star review here.
My stop on the blog tour is a guest post from Frank Duffy about their illustration process, with gorgeous images of their artwork from the anthology.
Proud illustration
Whenever I’m commissioned to create an illustration the first thing I do is find the energy of the piece. I read it over and over and then I sleep on it and I draw the images that come to mind after my sleep – little thumbnail scribbles that wouldn’t mean much to anyone else, just visual shorthand.
And with this piece the energy is swirly: there is the swirl of hormones and emotions, there is grief and shame, there is desire and there is the spinning and spinning of the records that accompany all these feelings in the main character.
It seemed obvious to me to combine the swirly energy with the image of the moon and stars that we see on the roof of the bus and with the spinning of a record, and to have this swirliness as the backdrop to one queer girl reaching out to another with a steadying hand. I wanted this to be about a moment of confused loneliness shattered.
I pretty much always create a grid of thirds in my sketchbook, dividing the page into three horizontally and vertically, and then composing the image with this grid in mind. The image came to me straight away. It’s a hard process to describe - a combination of intuition, logic and experience. If an image takes too long to come to me then I know it’s the wrong one.
With linocut the image is carved in reverse, a mirror, so that needs to be born in mind. I inked it up, printed it by hand, waited for it to dry, scanned it and sent it off – and am so very proud to be part of this incredible book!
And with this piece the energy is swirly: there is the swirl of hormones and emotions, there is grief and shame, there is desire and there is the spinning and spinning of the records that accompany all these feelings in the main character.
It seemed obvious to me to combine the swirly energy with the image of the moon and stars that we see on the roof of the bus and with the spinning of a record, and to have this swirliness as the backdrop to one queer girl reaching out to another with a steadying hand. I wanted this to be about a moment of confused loneliness shattered.
I pretty much always create a grid of thirds in my sketchbook, dividing the page into three horizontally and vertically, and then composing the image with this grid in mind. The image came to me straight away. It’s a hard process to describe - a combination of intuition, logic and experience. If an image takes too long to come to me then I know it’s the wrong one.
With linocut the image is carved in reverse, a mirror, so that needs to be born in mind. I inked it up, printed it by hand, waited for it to dry, scanned it and sent it off – and am so very proud to be part of this incredible book!
Thank you so much Frank for sharing how you created this amazing artwork! It's fascinating to compare the linocut to the finished image.
You can check out the other stops on the Proud blog tour using the banner below.
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