Cover 2 Cover 2017 - sketchbook five - Shadows

This, selected for Charles Burns' Shadows theme, was a different class of book. It was a beautiful period hardback about photography, with elegant typography and full page monochrome photographs. It was also printed on nice paper - thick, matt and creamy in colour, it took every media we collectively threw at it - it had enough "tooth" for pencils and enough integrity for watercolour.

It was a book that demanded to be worked with rather than to be worked on, or against.

Shadows and reflections. Cello: woodblock, printed in the Japanese style, with fountainpen inks. Wineglass: Molotow One4All markers.

I enjoyed the (unintentional?) pun of the horse being out of its stable and then decided to extrapolate the leaping equine's future from the photograph using an assortment of flat inks for silhouettes.

A rare outbreak of watercolour (with a good few lines from a pen) for these January morning shadows found in Green Park on a recent trip to London. The view is towards a very hazy Buckingham Palace. The monochrome photograph looked uncomforatable next to the colours I'd added to the text, so I tinted it in watercolour.

The spiral ilustrates the golden mean referred to in the text, and my shadowy graphite hand is holding my actual rail ticket to London.

A slightly silly reference to the title on the page. I didn't touch the photograph on the opposing page.