blending styles
I've been busily working on the rough illustration phase for a children's book. It's the third in a series I have been illustrating for Meredith Costain, and technically I guess that means it's more relevant to my other website. But it also explains why there's not an awful lot of bird painting going on lately.
Only here's the funny coincidence, the woman in this particular story paints birds! Like me! She lives in a little cottage in the woods - that could one day be me! And all the local kids are terrified of her and call her a witch. Still. She's living the dream.
rough sketch for "Rosie and Ned and the Creepy Cave"
written by Meredith Costain, illustrated by Tina Burke
Published by Penguin Books 2010
As I look at blogs of creative people online, many have various outlets for their creativity — like art and writing, or knitting and collage work, photography and sewing .... I wonder whether they chop and change over the course of the day, or week, or find they work better if they focus on one craft at a time?
I find I go through phases. I won't, for example, work on a book in the morning then a bird painting in the afternoon. With me it's all one or the other. I set aside time — a week or a few weeks, for my birds, but when working on a book it can often be many weeks at a time, because a) publishing is a time-intensive field and each book will have multiple illustrations, and b) when I'm in my "kid's book" headspace, or working on a new story idea that excites me, that's simply all I can think about. Same goes for my "bird art" headspace. Don't even try and distract me.
There's a lot to be said for focusing on one craft/technique/outlet — it's how artists finesse their style and become masters rather than dabblers, but it seems there are also a lot of artists whose creativity just can't help but overflow into other areas or styles, and I do believe that often the various skills and styles can feed into each other and blend together to create our own unique vision (well, depending on the craft. I like to bake, too, but it doesn't help my drawing other than to give me snacks while I work). But even if the various endeavours don't quite blend together, diversity keeps life interesting, too, and that's a good thing. Plus I like snacks.
My inspiration for doing my series of birds in graphite actually came after illustrating this series of children's books that I'm currently working on. They are "chapter books" (short novels for early readers with lots of b&w illustrations). A lot of illustrators use ink/wash for these type of books, but I went with graphite. I love doing them — it's going back to pure drawing in it's most basic form. So I decided to do b&w illustrations for our two-storey, very blank wall in our loft apartment. Only instead of my cartoony style, I went back to my "grown-up" style.
Random Australian images (for our apartment in Canada)
by Tina Burke
left to right, top to bottom:
● countryside
● Palm Cockatoo
● Red-whiskered Bulbul (not an Australian native, but we had them in our garden and their cheerful chirrups made me happy)
● a rose from mum's garden
● Shelly Beach, Port Macquarie
● gum tree
● wind-swept tree at Nobby's Beach, Port Macquarie
● black swan (we used to feed them in Centennial Park, Sydney)
I find graphite so versatile — I love being able to capture the tiniest details and interesting textures, then blur off into a dreamy, evocative smudge. I liked how they seemed to look "old", like antique prints. And I love antique prints. So suddenly this idea became the basis for my bird art, which up until then I'd been painting with acrylics. So I packed away my paints and got drawing again. I know, it's not exactly re-inventing the wheel — graphite is usually where one starts when learning to draw and paint, but for me it was fresh and exciting again, and most importantly, fun.
Having said that, I still love colour, so my acrylics shall continue to make an appearance ...
once I get this book finished ...
