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Sunday 3 January 2016

The Writer’s Secret

In the comment thread after my Who Remembers Guru? post last summer, I mentioned that I wanted to try my hand at creating a similar “comic strip collage” using public domain images. A few weeks later I did a sort of trial run with the cover image for Jill Trent and the Flying Saucer Mystery, but with plenty of idle time over the Christmas break I thought I’d try something a little more ambitious.

I had a look round for a suitable idea, and came across this unpublished poem I wrote several years ago:
A world-renowned writer named Blott
Said of genres, “I’ve written the lot:
From horror and mystery
To fantastical history
And all of them have the same plot!”
Turning this into a Guru-style cartoon wasn’t as easy as I thought. There are thousands of free images on the web, but finding ones that fit (both thematically and stylistically) was harder than I’d expected. Also, the last line caused problems because it doesn’t have a natural visual interpretation. A fairly obvious idea did spring to mind, but I couldn’t use it on account of the “no porn” clause in Blogger’s terms and conditions. So I decided to go with a more abstract notion instead.

4 comments:

Kid said...

Very inventive, Andrew. Well done.

Andrew May said...

Thanks Kid - I just wish I had your drawing ability so I could do a real cartoon!

Kid said...

I wish I had the drawing ability that you think I have, Andrew, so that I could draw a real cartoon as well.

Andrew May said...

It's all relative, Kid. Looking at the samples you posted a few months ago (http://kidr77.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/not-just-letterer.html) you certainly have what I'd describe as "drawing ability". I mean you can draw figures from different perspectives with all the anatomy in the correct proportions, and all the facial features in the right places, which is more than I can do!