Aside

New picture for today! Continuing the theme of book re-imaginings, here’s an image that could have come out of one of my favourite novels, Susanna Clarke’s amazing “Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrel“.

This could be depicting Strange’s first expedition into the Fairy realm where he encounters the Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair. Now that I mention it, The Gentleman would be a pretty nice character to illustrate, so watch out for it appearing here some time. I’m really enjoying my looser style. This one was made with a couple of custom brushes that I made for myself in Photoshop. I start off by creating an interesting texture for my background without worrying too much about what I’m doing. Then I create a new layer and fill it with black. I then take one of my nice scratchy brushes and switch to eraser on low strength. I begin carving away the black, revealing the texture behind it. This is where I start to really figure out what the image is going to be. In this one I wanted some strong ghostly lights that light up only a few small areas of the landscape. I then use the Dodge tool to brighten these areas. I’ve created several tree brushes for myself over the years and I use them on eraser mode to pick out some dim shapes of trees in my black layer.