Category Archives: creative process

ATTEN….SHUN!!

ATTEN–SHUN! (Even Lassie came to see me. It must be an emergency.)

I have received a few nudges lately.

Yep. I’ve been lost in a world of moving house; a barrage of bills and boxes; a wilderness of wrapping. I’ve been so pooped, I can’t even alliterate for more than one sentence and ‘moving house’ doesn’t count.

Inane Squirrel Dog running hither and thither. This is not me, you understand. NOT me.

But I’m paying attention now. I’m here. Thank you to the nudgers one and all, for hauling me out of my box… or boxes.

I visited a friend the other day and sat down to do a few harmless blobs over a very nice G&T. To make it even easier, I made them dog blobs. Dog blobs are the easiest blobs, unless you count stay-as-they-are blobs. (Chickens can do those without even trying, so with all due respect to chickens I don’t count them as proper blobs.)

In the spirit of the whole blob thing, where the blob leads the whole story every inch of the way, I promise to include each and every blob in this post, even the ones that are SO WRONG!! All blobs measure around 2-3cm across so it’s really quite impolite to be enlarging them this much. A bit like looking up somebody’s nose.

Okay, I need to get this one out there. It’s hanging over my head and it is SO WRONG!

So so so so wrong!

Phew! All I can say is

THE BLOB MADE ME DO IT!

Irish Terrier x Bull Terrier in a bad mood (from a very nondescript blob.)

Dog breeders would say that this blob is all wrong as well. But I don’t mind him. He has a muscular, hardy look and may be useful carting boxes.

Perplexed Irish Soft-coated Wheaten Terrier born on the wrong side of the breeding box.

Being Blue-with-Brown-Spots has proven challenging for this Wheaten Terrier. It reminds me of studying the theme of ‘between cultures’ when I was at school…

A victim of perspective

Reminding us all that one’s situation in life is all a matter of perspective is this young Springer Spaniel x Staffordshire Bull Terrier. With his back half shown from above in the Stafford position of repose and his front half shown from the side in full Springer Spaniel spring, he could see himself as either getting somewhere or going nowhere.

Reg, the Space Dog

I have never seen a flop-eared dog do this before. His ear defies gravity. But perhaps Reg is in an anti-gravitational chamber and is practising to become a space dog. Luckily these days space dogs get to come down to earth again… I think.

Quite wrong. Pretty wrong. Almost certainly wrong.

This is Graham. Graham is undergoing hypnosis treatment, but not the kind you pay for. The hypnotist is an alien who has landed in the back garden and Graham was in the process of confronting him when an eerie light was switched on and began to swing slowly backwards and forwards… After that it was all up for Graham. I hope the alien is just going to take botanical samples from the garden, and not canine samples.

lickety-split

Lickety-split means fast, pell-mell, gangbusters, like a bat-outa-hell… well maybe not quite as fast as a bat-outa-hell. So I think these two dogs are engaged in a contest to see who can clean themselves more quickly. They are fairly evenly matched for size and white areas, but my money is on the brown and white dog because his tongue is larger. Stands to reason. Also the black and white dog looks like he is losing his cool a bit. He may be trying to wash his tail. If I were he, I’d leave it until last and trust to it’s being black. Nobody’s going to notice.

Emerson, the Blob Dog of Discontent

This blob dog is the smallest of all the blobs. Emerson was squished into the top left corner of the page. Perhaps that accounts partly for his disposition. Or, indeed he may be suffering from worms. (His posture is suggestive). But in fact, I suspect he was born this way and has been inflicting his testiness on everyone around him since puppyhood.

Even a dog biscuit would not help here.

Book Signing Phobia

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Here’s a lesser known part of the job of being a drawing machine. When we sign books for people, it is a nice thing for them if the signature comes with a little doodle, drawn for them, right before their very own eyes. And it’s nice to be able to do that for them. It makes us happy too. If it works.

But the inscription is done in pen and can’t be rubbed out or corrected.

And when we draw during the usual course of our day, we usually do many drafts of any illustration before we get it right.

And if we mess up our inscription doodle we have the problem of either sending a deplorable doodle out into the world defacing the otherwise pristine title page of a newly purchased book, or replacing the book with a new one… which we might also mess up.

Now remember that some of us are very temperamental drawing machines, the kind whose engines won’t start unless the key is turned in just the right particular way, may never run very well on a Tuesday, and if the oil runs low we are likely to smoke. You will now realise that the aforementioned anxieties at the back of our minds can cause a little fumble in the fingers; a wobble in the wrist; a twitch in the felt-tip… and then…

Doom!

That is why I am practising my book signatures today.

With Best Fishes – practising my book signing today and this is page four. Ahem.

I have spoken to illustrators who say they won’t do it any more. They will write anything but won’t draw. (And I’m not even going to discuss the issue of spelling difficult names correctly… or easy names for that matter.)

I have spoken to illustrators who say ‘it’s important to make the mark.’

I have watched with awe, some illustrators who sign and doodle with ease.

I have watched with awe, one illustrator who was CLEVER enough to get a rubber stamp made up in advance! (Yes, OtherJude, that was very clever!)

And I have used my bookmark giveaways to circumvent this problem with some success. (It’s much less stressful to draw on a bookmark, than a $25 book.)

Anyway, see you at the next book signing!

I’m ready.

I think.

Enjoy your bookmark!

Leonard Chooses His Hues

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I have given the medium for Leonard Doesn’t Dance a lot of thought over the last few months. I knew that I wanted the style to be very different from Thunderstorm Dancing, quicker, looser, lighter in touch and for some reason sherberty… Ahem. Don’t ask me why.

And during my time in Italy, I was immersed in so much illustration at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair that it was the perfect time to consider what I did and didn’t want to do, and what was already done too many times elsewhere.

Ann James and I talked about illustration styles, strengths and weaknesses too. She told me that the key to good illustration is authenticity. When she looks at a folio of work, if the expression of line or character feels genuine, as though it really comes from the illustrator’s inner self, then technical weaknesses don’t matter so much. You can see the kernel of the artist in the work and it’s good. I’m re-phrasing of course, because I can’t remember the exact words that either of us used. But this is the gist of it.

So where does that leave me as a wandering artist, prone to changes of style? What is my kernel?

I came to the conclusion that I am very comfortable with my pencil, and my line is probably most expressive of my style or styles. Most me. I had decided that I would use pencil or fine liner (for the lightness of touch), white backgrounds on most pages, and colour the drawings swiftly and joyously in bright, (sherberty) digital colour.

Here are some old artworks for the sake of discussion of medium. None of them were drawn for Leonard Doesn’t Dance.

fine liner with quick sherberty digital colour. (originally drawn for 52 Week Illustration Challenge – theme WORDS)

Perhaps this parrot cartoon isn’t a perfect example of what I had in mind, but it’s me, and it has the fine line that I want, the simple, swift colour and the white background. And it’s playful. Playfulness is key to this book.

loose lines with digital colour (originally drawn for 52 Week Illustration Challenge theme – LINE)

This continuous line drawing is a little heavier in line (a thicker fine liner) and heavier in tone too, on the cream background of a vintage book which was the very thing that inspired the work for Thunderstorm Dancing. But even so, it is me at my most comfortable with a wandering line… making it up as I go along.

So there I was. All decided.

Then the discussion of clothes came up with the Frances Watts and the publishing team.

Do these birds wear any clothes? Should Leonard be wearing those breeches? Or should he not?

During the course of this (somewhat cheeky) discussion I whizzed through some ‘Trouserbirds’ as evidence of the way my bird drawings had been going in recent times. Most of them were wearing trousers. The examples I sent were from my series of blob birds; all painted by starting with a pale grey washy blob, and then transforming it into wacky creatures with watercolour.

Fine liner, white background, sherberty. Paint instead of digital colour… (a blob experiment from 2014)

fine liner, watercolour, trousers… why not? (These blob experiments from last year are darker in tone, but that is mostly about the shade of grey used in the original blob. Partly too about their wintery clothes which seemed to ask for deeper, more tweedy tones.)

Frances Watts was taken with the watercolour. Which gave pause for thought. Because I really enjoyed making these blobs and was already planning a book for them of my own. But there’s no reason why they couldn’t launch with Leonard…

More soon.

Leonard Doesn’t Dance: A Bird of Character

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In between racing around madly organising for our auction this coming Saturday, (I refrained from using hysterical capitalisation there. Did you notice?) I have REALLY enjoyed (emphatic, enthusiastic capitalisation) doing a few character sketches for Leonard.

Leonard is the main character for my upcoming picture book with Frances Watts, to be published by HarperCollins next year. Just to put you ever so quickly into the loop, Leonard started in my head as a little fellow with a disastrously swishy tail, inspired by our Australian Willy Wagtails, who swish their tails from side to side constantly.

The colour sketch I drew for a spontaneous cover, the first day I received the manuscript

further tail wagging doodles drawn during a HarperCollins Author workshop

Then I found out that Frances had only one request: that Leonard be a bigger, galumphing kind of bird, and not a little tweety-bird type. So this sent me off in other directions and I did some galumphing doodles over a period of time while I was finishing Thunderstorm Dancing.

I continued with my doodles while I was travelling in Italy during April.

In the back of my mind there was a memory of a wonderful, lanky bird from Africa called the Secretary Bird. I looked him up and found him to be wonderfully elegant, wearing short black breeches to below the ‘knee’ and a fancy headdress (from which he got his name) and a wonderful set of wings for flying to bird parties.

His beak is quite different from the one I had imagined. I thought I might alter him to make him a unique bird bearing only a partial resemblance to the Secretary Bird. But as sketches continued, I found I enjoyed him very much, just the way he is.

Leonard

If he won’t work on the page for me with all those smaller birds, I may have to re-think him, but I am quite attached to him already.

More on this process soon, and I will tell you about the decisions about my medium.

Japanese ceramics in a baroque Italian city

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Here’s a wee snippet of my trip before I forget everything!

Unexpected sunshine in Bologna was followed with unexpected cold in souther Italy. Francesco, David, Ann and me.

Unexpected sunshine in Bologna was followed by unexpected cold in southern Italy. Francesco, David, Ann and me.

Francesco – one of our gracious guides in Puglia. Guaranteed to be able to chat to anyone and get you in to see treasures.

One of the cities we visited in Puglia was the baroque city of Lecce, which features roman ruins and plenty of over-the-top baroque architecture, as well as some hidden artists’ studios, which you may be lucky enough to visit if you have a local tour guide to introduce you.

On our way in to Lecce, we noticed some colourful ceramic fish set to ‘fly’ above the doorway of a little studio on a corner. The door was closed and locked, the interior dim. But when we knocked and waited a few minutes, what treasures were revealed to us!

This cosy and crowded cavern is the studio of a Japanese ceramics artist Nagase Hiroko, who moved to Italy with her husband many years earlier. She speaks Italian, English, Japanese and is currently studying Chinese at night school. She is lively, loquacious and clearly has a love of knowledge and human interaction.

Hiroko wraps treasures for us

Crowded quarters as Ann Haddon and Ann James talk with Hiroko. David (right) takes up a lot of vertical space but not much horizontal space thankfully :-)

I wish I had taken more photos, but I was afraid both of being rude and of knocking things from shelves, laden as I was with backpack and bag. There were five of us visiting and the space was narrow.

spotty birds, sugar bowls, little heads, in bloomsbury colours. (I feel certain Vanessa Bell would have loved them.)

Hiroko kept up a constant stream of delightful conversation, some in Italian (with Fran) and some in English for us. Here she is looking for a particular treasure to show us.

I bought several small items as souvenir gifts for friends, but the one thing I wanted to buy for myself was this bird (below) with a blue head and splashy pink back. I was by no means certain it could survive a trip home in a packed suitcase, but the choice was not mine to make. Hiroko would not part with it. She loved it and did not think she could replicate it, due to the the inconsistencies of the making, firing and glazing processes. She has never managed to get those particular shades of colour again, or make the beak just right. Each piece is fired four times, first to bake the clay and then to get different glazes to do different things. I really respect her for this refusal to sell. She said she has sold some of her favourite things in the past and has always regretted it.

The bird I wanted (rear). Too precious for the artist to part with. On the shelf below are little owls that hoot charmingly when you blow into them.

If you wish to see Hiroko’s studio while visiting southern Italy, or to contact her, here are her details.

Later I’ll post photos of the papier mâché artist’s studio that we visited on the way out!

Meet me at Federation Square

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If anyone is in the vicinity of Melbourne on Sat 13 June, I’ll be drawing at the Books Illustrated stall in Federation Square Book Market and the fabulous Ann Haddon will be selling signed copies of Thunderstorm Dancing by Katrina Germein, illustrated by me. Some of my other books will also be on sale.

Drawing and signing at Bologna Children’s Book Fair (In front with the green scarf, the lovely Sonia who has been attending the fair every year since she was a child.)

Come and say hello. I’d love to meet you! I love people to talk to me when I’m drawing… not sure what I’ll be drawing… but it’ll be something. And I’ll try to bring along some stormy craft sheets for you to take away and use to have some arty fun with your little ones… or by yourself. I’m all for that too.

Sketch for dancing scene with Poppy, from Thunderstorm Dancing by Katrina Germein

At this stage it looks like I’ll be starting at around 1pm and drawing for a couple of hours, but I’ll try to remember to update you on that a little closer to the time.

Flying by the Seat of my Pants

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Fleering … Shakespearian for grinning. Who would have thought? Do you know that you can paint in the bath using your ArtGraf water-soluble graphite block in its handy tin and a brush. Just add bathwater.

My apologies for my long absence from posting. I have been flying, not fleering.

The Bologna Children’s Book Fair was an eye-opening and fabulous experience. More on that later.

Elizabeth Honey, Ann Haddon and Judy Watson enter The Fair

Puglia was beautiful, and the trulli were as lovely as I could wish them to be. More on that later too.

trullo with red doors and grapevines

While I was flying to Italy, my husband Scott bought a house for us at auction and when I returned home two weeks later, I was thrown into a whirlwind of preparation for the sale of our current house. Whirlwind notwithstanding and with our auction two weeks away, it’s back to work today. And this is a marker post!

Leonard here I come.

Ophelia

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Here’s Ophelia, my wee scrap of a girl who appeared when I was working on my Imago Mundi canvas. She found a home this evening on an even tinier canvas. This one is 7cm x 10cm.

Imago Mundi

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**The Imago Mundi web site says:**

Art is born from a complex direct relationship with its surroundings and culture.
Imago Mundi’s ambition is to unite these diversities of our world in a common frame of artistic expression.

I am lucky that a friend opened the door for me to participate in this wonderful international exhibition. (Thanks Juliet)

Here is my tiny canvas for Imago Mundi.

‘Seen and not Heard’ (dedicated to Gillian Triggs)

I’m endlessly fascinated with vintage cabinet card portraits, so this came out of that space, and also from my interest in the cladding of women under layers and layers of ornament. There is a drawn woman under the coat. It’s a strange thing to add layers of clothing to a drawn woman and slowly hide her from view. (Something I explored earlier here.)

But I was also thinking of Professor Gillian Triggs trying to be heard in the Australian Federal Government arena as I made this artwork.

It’s made with acrylic paint, indian ink, felt tip, watercolour and collaged book pages on a very small canvas.

scraps of girls who will go somewhere else

#IStandwithGillianTriggs

Trudy and Dodds go to class

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Tomorrow I’m lucky enough to have a spot in the Faber Writing Academy Picture Book Masterclass. I’ll be taking Trudy and Dodds, roughly formed as they are, to have a little work out.

To recap on Trudy and Dodds, this is a picture book project that I received a grant to develop back in mid 2012. The grant was part of a new Children’s Picture Book Illustrators’ Initiative managed by the ASA and funded by the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts.

One of the images I included with my grant submission. A little pen and ink sketch with digital colour. (Trudy in a purple shirt. Dodds on the billy cart.)

I drew dogs as the characters at that time because I have been drawing dogs (with and without clothes) for as long as I can remember. Has anyone else read The Lives of the Monster Dogs? But all along I really thought, I’d rather they were doggish than dogs: doggish, because dogs are part of human history, and if we aren’t mortally afraid of them, most of us love them. But not exactly dogs, because… just because. They are human really.

Unfortunately for Trudy and Dodds, the grant came just after I had accepted the manuscript for Thunderstorm Dancing and they got caught up in a delay of nearly three years! (Thank you to Lucie Stevens at the ASA for her patience in extending my timelines several times.)

But NOW, it’s time to move forward. And I’m excited about the masterclass tomorrow, and a little nervous. Not nervous about writing, because I love writing. But nervous about sharing my writing aloud for the first time since I left school back in the ’80s. Ahem!

So this week I…

• Had lots of ideas about the medium, style and setting.

And got lots of inspiration for the architecture and setting from looking at Puglia and the trulli there. (See my earlier post on those here.) The architecture and setting are very important to me for this story, and were a big part of the original concept that I submitted to the Australia Council way back at the start of 2012. At that time, my inspiration was Mexico. But now! I’m going to be researching and recording the setting while I visit my friend David Capon in Puglia during April. I am so looking forward to it.

Trulli in a rough scene to open Trudy and Dodds

• FINALLY finished the first draft of the manuscript. (Hooray!)

I was having a lot of trouble getting the last quarter to work, even though I knew what was to happen at the end. What I didn’t want was a story that leaps into action and then sort of… peters out…. blaah. Yeah well… so then… hmmm…

• Started a DUMMY book for it.

I had my usual problems with this. I have trouble drawing the loose, loose, rough things to begin with that show the shapes on the page. I need somebody to stand over me tapping their foot when I am doing this, and looking at their watch. That actually works. If I don’t have a timekeeper I get all distracted with details in the pictures. And then… well then you need to change something because THAT isn’t going to happen on THIS page anymore. And then you go… errm… why did I draw that in so much detail? Doh!

For a glimpse at how it’s supposed to be done, go here!

• Started making rough models for Dodds

And then bounced off those to make drawings for Dodds.

Dodds – Take 1

Dodds Take 2 – skeleton and sinew (of sorts). Is this a karate pose?

Dodds 1 and Dodds 2

Dodds found his smile when the paper jaw went on.

Dodds with paper bag trousers added

An initial sketch of the model. Finding my way

Dodds sketch with the nose, jaw and gentle expression starting to settle into place. He’s a gentle giant. I looked at Wrestlers from the 1940s for inspiration.

Tell you later, how we get on at class.

THE BLOB MADE ME DO IT!

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Art is born from a complex direct relationship with its surroundings and culture. Imago Mundi’s ambition is to unite these diversities of our world in a common frame of artistic expression.

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• Had lots of ideas about the medium, style and setting.

• FINALLY finished the first draft of the manuscript. (Hooray!)

• Started a DUMMY book for it.

• Started making rough models for Dodds

Share this:

Art is born from a complex direct relationship with its surroundings and culture.
Imago Mundi’s ambition is to unite these diversities of our world in a common frame of artistic expression.