Little Pierre No.1

A character based on my admiration for silent film comedians. Little Pierre is a literal translation for the french Pierrot character (just hopefully not as scary). 

Sherlock Holmes Competition

 I have just submitted my entry for The House of Illustration's annual competition with the Folio Society. This year the brief is to design the binding plus three selected stories: A Scandal in Bohemia, The Man with the Twisted Lip and The Musgrave Ritual. 

I've been a Sherlock Holmes fan for as long as I can remember. Growing up in Britain, you cannot escape the image of the great detective. I used to watch the Granada series starring Jeremy Brett as Holmes and David Burke/ Edward Hardwicke as Dr. John Watson, then I discovered the Basil Rathbone/ Nigel Bruce films, which are so much fun. When I was roughly 10 years old I read my first Holmes adventure: The Hound of the Baskervilles. I remember having to actually stop reading after this exchange between Holmes and Dr. Mortimer in Chapter Two:

"But one false statement was made by Barrymore at the inquest. He said that there were no traces upon the ground round the body. He did not observe any. But I did—some little distance off, but fresh and clear."
     "Footprints?"
     "Footprints."
     "A man's or a woman's?"
     Dr. Mortimer looked strangely at us for an instant, and his voice sank almost to a whisper as he answered:
     "Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!"

Like M. R. James, Conan Doyle has that skill for concocting a fairly simple sentence that makes you freeze. 

THE BINDING

For this project, I wanted to steer clear of the trappings of Sherlock Holmes. As much as I love the deerstalker/Inverness coat/pipe, they have unfortunately become cliche. The deestalker and coat would do fine for Holmes in the countryside, but hardly suitable for his rooms in Baker Street.

I think of Victorian London as the third main character of the Holmes stories. Conan Doyle really gives you a sense of the true nastiness and grime of the city. I felt that was important to illustrate on cover, London characterized as a red skull, the respected buildings of the city, associated with the Upper Class (Houses of Parliament, St. Paul's Cathedral, Tower Bridge) as the teeth, gnashing down on the city. In the midst Holmes and Watson stand guard, like guardian angels.

The yellow scheme was inspired by the first addition of Dracula, which is a masterclass in simplicity. Yellow background with the words "Dracula" in red lettering. We know what Dracula means, so that's all we need, but back then they had no idea what to expect. The red in my cover owes to the Sherlock Holmes quote in A Study in Scarlet: 

 “There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.”

It's another quote that has always stuck with me, and a nice Easter egg tribute to the story that started it all. The font was of my own design, a typical Victorian-seeming font that had to be thin (I mean, look at the length of that title-WHEW!)

A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA

Arguably the most famous short story in the Holmes collection. This story contains the only appearance of Irene Adler, who is not as big a presence in the canon as other media suggest. She is the only person to ever best Holmes, and for that he deeply respects her. I think of Adler as the true hero of the story, she was a person wronged by a wealthy noble. Sure, her methods are perhaps questionable, but you're definitely on her side more than the Prince. My illustration depicts how others perceive her:  

"She has the face of the most beautiful of women and the mind of the most resolute of men."

THE MAN WITH THE TWISTED LIP

This is a great example of an atmospheric story. The scene of Watson searching for a friend's husband in the opium den is rather eerie:

'Through the gloom one could dimly catch a glimpse of bodies lying in strange fantastic poses, bowed shoulders, bent knees, heads thrown back, and chins pointing upward, with here and there a dark, lack-lustre eye turned upon the newcomer.'

Originally I was going to make the smoke and faces yellow, which I always think of as a sickly colour. But, seeing as how it was a Chinese opium den, I was concerned about the negative Racist connotations. I think in the end the green works better. It adds depth to the picture where the yellow couldn't. This was the first illustration I had made and it shaped the future illustrations, the main characters in full colour, with an omnipresence in green.

THE MUSGRAVE RITUAL

This was a trickier story to illustrate, as not a lot really happens. It is a story within a story: Watson's account of Holmes' telling of an early case, which also includes a friend recapping the events that led him to ask Holmes for assistance. There's Holmes firing the famous V.R. into his wall, but until the treasure hunt, there's nothing that truly jumped out to me illustration-wise. Plus, I hadn't drawn Holmes yet and really wanted to. The moment where Homes and Musgrave uncover the body of Brunton immediately struck me as a truly Horror moment, à la Barbara Steele in The Pit and the Pendulum (1961):

'At the moment, however, we had no thought for the old chest, for our eyes were riveted upon that which crouched beside it. It was the figure of a man, clad in a suit of black, who squatted down upon his hams with his forehead sunk upon the edge of the box and his two arms thrown out on each side of it'