April 27, 2015

The Duchess of Lists Hides The Scream Up Her Sleeve

My graphic designer continued to cut out details from the illustrations in my poetry chapbook of women monsters. She mentioned to me that since so many of the details focused on hands, she was trying to vary the cut outs by using other details, like a decorative vase. I thought about what she noticed and realized that hands did indeed feature quite prominently in the illustrations. Not only were they a standard detail in most of the illustrations, the hand was a sub text in the poetry as well. The monsters pointed, poked, grabbed and grasped.

Having discovered the theme of the hand in my handiwork, I immediately wrote to my designer friend and told her to use just the hands as details because what she noticed was indeed a theme that could be pointed to.

The next figure to carve a detail out of was the Duchess of Lists. The detail that my friend culled from this was her hand pointing to items on a list. In redrawing this detail I added a detail within the detail. I decided to have the Duchess hiding a detail of Munch’s famous painting, "The Scream" up her sleeve. My friend thought that it was a fitting detail for the flavor of dark humor in this series of poetry.

The entire illustration is pictured above, the revised detail at right.

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