My Women, My Monsters is about to be published

My illustrated chapbook, My Women, My Monsters, is being put together at Finishing Line Press as I write this. It is a short chapbook if you don’t count the illustrations. But it took a long time to write on account of the elaborate illustrations. These were completed with tightly woven pencil patterns in a broad tonal range. This required using a large array of pencils from 6H to 9B. It was time consuming but I got the effect that I wanted - designs that look similar to the graded ink painting that I learned long ago in the People’s Republic of China.

Most of the illustrations are designed to fit on the page opposite the poem which describes it. But some of the poetry stretched beyond the usual one page format. This created a conundrum for my first graphic designer who was helping me create PDF files for my book. What was to be done for the page opposite the remainder of a poem? The solution, also a bit painstaking, was to extract a detail from the original drawing and make a new, smaller drawing from that.  In redrawing the detail view, as seen here at right, I chose to embellish slightly so this is not an exact copy of the original.

An example of the overwritten page and the extra drawing can be found in my illustration for the poem, "Twinkle Tinsel Toe Fairy," a sardonic verse about magical thinking. Because the last verse describes the fairy’s magic wand, I decided to focus on that. And here is a fitting end to the line "....and "poof" they all are gone!"