Every Page of Moby-Dick and more...

Friday, June 28, 2013

More on "The Desert Places"

I am fortunate enough to have two books coming out this autumn, a fully illustrated version of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness coming in November from my fine publisher Tin House Books, and a unique hybrid text, The Desert Places, written by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss with 16 full color illustrations and a cover by me, coming in October from Curbside Splendor. I'll post the cover below and here is a press release with more info about the book. Take a look.

Thursday, April 4, 2013

"HEART OF DARKNESS" ENDPAPERS

I love beautiful books, and I love when attention is lavished upon the design of a book. One of the ways this attention manifests itself is in endpapers, which at one time were quite common but have sadly disappeared almost entirely. I was thrilled when my fine publisher Tin House Books contacted me about creating hand-drawn endpapers for my upcoming illustrated edition of Heart of Darkness. One visual element which was a constant thread running through many of my illustrations was the African jungle. Or, rather, the idea of the African jungle, abstracted to the point of being a single, massive wall of vegetation. That was my earliest impression of Heart of Darkness, from my first reading many years ago, and it is an image and an idea I keep returning to every time I make the journey through the story again. For these endpapers, I was fascinated by the idea of them literally enclosing and containing the book, and that visual of a massive wall of impenetrable, forbidding green jungle was the only option. At the last moment, I decided to include a small image of Marlow in the lower right corner since this is in so many ways his story. Right now, I am not yet sure if Tin House will include that image of Marlow or if the drawing will be cropped and slightly enlarged to show the leaves only. Either way I will be pleased, and I am absolutely thrilled that this next book of mine is shaping up to be every bit as beautiful an object as my Moby-Dick in Pictures was.

Here is my drawing for the endpapers...

Monday, February 11, 2013

"Heart of Darkness" cover

Coming in October 2013 from my fine publisher Tin House Books, a new edition of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness with 100 full color illustrations by me. Above is the final cover, and I couldn't be more pleased. It captures everything I was trying to convey with my illustrations, and is just a brilliant piece of work. Many many thanks to Diane Chonette at Tin House for putting this together, and to Tin House in general for making this dream a reality.

Feel free to re-post this or share it in any way you would like.