£
Illustrating The Builder
(This article discusses imagery and plot elements of The Builder. We've tried to avoid any really overt spoilers, but you might want to leave it until after you've read the story.)
"Days pass and the inside of the house is cleared of furniture, joinery turned to embers; even the wallpaper, scraped easily from damp-dusted walls, is reduced to ash in the same fire that carried off the furniture and doors."
David Frankel's story, in which every almost object takes on meaning for the reader through its destruction, gave us plenty to think about when it came to creating the title page illustration.
With that destruction on our minds, we started by burning some matches:
A striking and satisfying image in many ways, but we weren't sure whether it felt specific enough to the story. We decided to try drawing some of the objects themselves, and started with a recurring image of an old rope swing:
Another strong image, but the role it plays in the story means that we didn't necessarily want to draw the reader's attention to it right at the start.
Thinking about the house itself, and in particular one wing from which '… small windows stare piggy-eyed across the back yard …', we came up with something:
… but it's perhaps more a drawing of an entire house rather than just a wing (as in the story), and the style didn't quite work with the illustrations we were working on for the rest of the book.
Thinking again about the objects in the house, we tried a stack of kitchen chairs:
We liked this one, but we needed something that would work in a variety of sizes, as the story images appear in several places (including on this website). And although the stack of chairs makes a great full page, it doesn't work particularly well when shown small.
In the end, we turned back to the matches, which made a suitable image for the first story in the anthology, and gave us not just the title page for The Builder, but also the spine image for the book itself. As each match was drawn separately, we tried a few different selections before settling on this:
However, just before going to press we noticed that one of the matches appears to be presenting the reader with the middle finger, so we made a last-minute tweak for the final version:
