Get in the Game, Salem Witches

 

I always think about this when I read about the Salem Witch Trials. Compared to earlier accounts of witches and wizards, Salem witches are so... lackluster. At least Scottish witches of the time period claimed to be able to control the weather! C'mon, Salem, you need to work a little harder.

Happy Halloween! 

Happy Halloween!

The finished paintings! All on display in the front yard just in time for Trick or Treaters.

Work in Progress for Halloween

I had some leftover wood after re-uphostering chairs, and decided to make some Halloween decorations. Here are the creatures just cut out of wood (and placed in a suitable sylvan setting).

 And here they are with some paint on them. Finished work to come soon!

Bridget Bishop

Starting a new thing here - I've decided that whenever I read a book, I ought to illustrate something from it. I just finished "Witchcraft at Salem" by Chadwick Hansen, which I picked ip in the Salem Witch Museum bookstore. After reading it, I was inspired to do this portrait of Bridget Bishop.

And Halloween coming up as well wasn't a bad incentive either.

According to Hansen, there were a lot of innocent people executed in the Salem witch craze, but Bridget Bishop was not one of them. Totally a witch, willing to use image magic to get back at people she didn't like. And creepy enough to freak people out enough to believe her curses actually worked. So a good first choice for my drawing project, especially in October.

As for the book, I can't recommend it highly enough. Aside from being really informative, it's just so well written that it was a joy to read.

On a completely unrelated note, I think "Chadwick Hansen" is the best name ever. Had I known about this book earlier, I may have named my son "Chadwick Hansen Valentino." I told my son about this. He said if I had, he would have always harbored some resentment towards me as long as he lived. So probably for the best that this is a recent find.

We interrupt Hansel and Gretel...

...for a quick contest entry. The New Yorker just recently wrapped up their third annual "Redraw Tilley" contest (Eustace Tilley is the New Yorker's logo guy – if you go to the contest site, you'll see what he looks like). I found out about it so close to the deadline that I was afraid I wouldn't be able to get an entry in under the wire, but fortunately I did. No word on the winners yet (they can pick up to 12). But check out the other entries – sure, there are some not-so-professional attempts, but there is also a lot of great art there as well. There's even some that weren't drawn so well, but were fantastic ideas. My favorite in that last category is the one of Tilley as Batman. If that had been rendered better, and the batsignal had been shining where the butterfly usually goes, I would have picked that one for a winner.

And now a quick rant about professionalism. The one thing that bugs me is how many pieces are entered multiple times, with tweaks or color changes or titles added later. In my opinion, you ought to get it to a complete finish first, and not swamp the contest pages with revisions or slightly different variations (in particular, the one hailing the cab, in I-lost-count-of-how-many-variations, really annoys me). I say, make it as good as you can, and just post it already. Overly cranky on my part, I know, but that's the illustrator in me. If you've got an illustration client, you don't hand them a dozen versions of the final and say, "I don't know, which of these do you think is okay?" That's comp stuff – not finals.

Enough ranting – back to my entry. This isn't totally off the Hansel and Gretel theme I've got going here. I came up with the idea as I was thumbing through my sketchbook, trying to find an unused page, and passed by my witch sketch for the story. I liked the idea of Tilley as a witch so much that I forget what I was going to sketch if I had found the blank page first.