Friday, May 9, 2008

“And Now For A Little Comedy Sketch …”

An interesting little digression away from our usual flummery, people, courtesy of Scamp. Fintan Taite was … no, let’s allow Fintan tell the story. Fintan, you rascally drawing-type scamp, sir? Take it away …
“Hodder Headline commissioned me to do an illustration for the cover of Twenty Major’s first book, THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX PARK, based on characters from his profanity-filled popular blog: twentymajor.net.
“At the time of commissioning there was no text from the book available so I was sent a description of the characters and a brief outline of the plot. They also supplied me with a rough sketch their cover designer had put together as a guide. The illustration was to take up about 50% of the available cover space.
  “The first thing I noticed about the rough was that all the characters had their backs turned, which I immediately had major reservations about … I felt the coarse humour of the book and blog would be much better served by establishing what the characters looked like at a glance … and to be honest, much more fun to draw from my point of view. I did a quick character sketch of Twenty and sent it off to the art director to show how I was thinking …”
For the rest, and to see how the cover art was built up frame-by-frame, jump on over here. Or here. We’re not fussy …

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Declan Burke has published a number of novels, the most recent of which is ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL. As a journalist and critic, he writes and broadcasts on books and film for a variety of media outlets, including the Irish Times, RTE, the Irish Examiner and the Sunday Independent. He has an unfortunate habit of speaking about himself in the third person. All views expressed here are his own and are very likely to be contrary.