Saturday, October 30, 2010

Finished?




 Home now for two weeks and during that time I have been struggling with the cover for A Rhyme in Time. The first two attempts were complete failures. Ugly, stiff, static, badly drawn, wrong, wrong, frustratingly wrong. Hours of sitting and painting wasted. Evetually I went and walked through a couple of fields and caught a glimpse of something better.
Hours of painting and at last I think I have finished. Wrapped up in the cover are rhymes from inside: 

Hark hark, the dogs do bark.
Tom, Tom the piper's son.
Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross.
Cock-a-doodle do.
 Sing, sing, what shall I sing? 
Four and twenty tailors went to catch a snail.
I saw a ship a sailing.
Jack be nimble.
How many miles to Babylon.
All the pretty little horses.





The painting came from many places. A love of watches, a memory box, a carousel seen in Milton Keynes, the work of Terry Gilliam, keys, clocks and stars and the mad anarchic nature of nursery rhymes.

Now I am tidying up my studio, looking and thinking, and then I will move on to the next painting.

10 comments:

  1. Well they turned out beautifully perfect! And I know well that struggle to make the muse sit down & behave...I'm glad you found the inspiration you needed xx

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  2. Truly wonderful. You're a genious, and you could sell the other paintings as prints, so not totally wasted I hope :D

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  3. Don't look at it as time wasted. It was work that helped you get to the beautiful drawings above.

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  4. your perseverance & hard work have paid off in spades, the cover is magic Jackie!

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  5. You have created gorgeous paintings again, dear talented artist.

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  6. What a wealth of detail for a child to pour over! (Can't help thinking how great it would be if someone could actually make a clock like that, where the figures would rotate around the clock face with the passage of time.) Delightfully eye catching -- as a cover should be. Brava!

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  7. The first two couldn't possibly be used as prints. I'm not wasting time working on paintings that didn't work to finish them. They just don't make the grade. Hannah is having one to play with and the other is heading for the bin.
    But the time wasn't wasted. Sometimes things just have to be worked through and it isn't possible to get it right every time.
    These are off to the hands of the designer now, which worries me as it is possible to kill an image with the wrong design.

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  8. I haven't been here for a while , but wow! This is gorgeous! I would love a big clock that looked like that! This book is going to be fabulous!

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  9. Both of those are utterly gorgeous Jackie. Thank you for sharing them here. Is that Max or Maurice in there?! I love that lady's red coat too.

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  10. I'd love to have a clock(s) like that, Jackie!

    -Dean

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