SKETCHBOOKS: moleskine 001

Borrowing heavily from this illustration of mine, from Moby-Dick, I again worked with a texture that I seem obsessed with. Thinking, as I so often do, about Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast novels, I remembered a recurring illustration from Titus Alone, two stone-faced policemen with bizarre squid-like head ornaments, staring directly out from the page at the reader. Their presence in the book is silently menacing and Peake's illustration does a marvelous job of creating a sense of nameless dread in the viewer. I didn't want my own knights to look quite so imposing, but I wanted that twinned sense of vigilance and strength. My wife sometimes refers to when I work with white paint or charcoal on a black field as my "ghostly technique" so these two knights became known as "The Ghostly Knights."