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Illustrating What My Father Left Behind
(This article discusses imagery and plot elements of What My Father Left Behind. We've tried to avoid any really overt spoilers, but you might want to leave it until after you've read Nathaniel Spain's story.)
With its rich use of imagery throughout the story, What My Father Left Behind was one of the first pieces that we looked at when it came to preparing the artwork for Broken Ground.
Our starting point, naturally enough, was the stuffed Victorian mermaid that the narrator's late father has left among the possessions in his house.
"One of the most horrible items in my father's collection was a mermaid. It ogled him across his desk for seven years, until he died on New Year's Day in 1953."
There was a rich tradition in the 19th century of these stuffed 'mermaids' - often made of a combination of monkey and fish, or even carved from wood. The most famous example is probably P T Barnum's Fiji Mermaid.
We had a crack at drawing one, and came up with this:
(In an echo of the original 19th century mermaids, that image is actually two separate ink drawings stitched together, as Lucy wasn't happy with the first tail.)
Thoroughly creepy and horrible, but once the first shivers had subsided and children frightened out of the studio, we felt that it was a little too obvious: the mermaid is certainly central to the story, but we wanted the illustrations to capture the atmosphere and themes of each piece rather than simply "show the scary thing". And creepy though Lucy's picture is, if we used it we'd be robbing our readers of the chance to get creeped out by their own imaginations.
So, no mermaid.
We decided to try a less literal approach. Much of the imagery in the story is connected with water, so next we played around with drawings of rainfall:
Then we tried something that referenced the London setting of the story:
These may have been taking us too far from the story itself, though. (There's a lot of black in these images too, and we weren't entirely sure how well it would reproduce, either on the printed page or here on the website. A big black smudge wouldn't really evoke much of anything.)
We turned back to more detailed line art, and came up with something that had the right blend of specific and abstract for the final illustration:
