Finished-ish

I've chosen to illustrate this post with one of the many rejected illustrations I did for my friend's forthcoming novel. The novelist has actually only rejected the one. I rejected the rest, though mostly before I'd bothered to ink the pencil sketches, as I did this one. I've submitted 35 illustrations for the book, 34 chapter headings, and one end-note sort of a thing, about which the novelist knows nothing as it's a small caricature of himself and meant to be a surprise. (Luckily, he never looks at this little business of mine unless I show it to him at our weekly breakfast, so no worries there.) Remains to be seen if any or all of the ones sent in will work, as they are to be reproduced, as it were, in miniature, in roughly a one inch square. I am worried many of the submitted pictures may prove insufficiently robust to survive the reduction. It's not the detail lost that troubles me, as that was to be expected, but rather that my rather spidery efforts at reproducing even perfectly recognizable, every day items like books and pencils and things, will fade to meaninglessness when shrunk but so big. This will be my first effort at having drawings fit into a preordained space, and one so small, so I really have no idea what will or won't work.

Some of my efforts, like the above, I decided simply weren't very good, at whatever size. The problem with a number of them, including this one, had everything to do with me rather than the subject or the eventual reproduction. Surprisingly, some of my most faithful efforts, drawn straight from life, ended up looking entirely too abstract and vague. Books, for instance. One would think that drawing simple rectangles, in relation to one another and to the nice, squared space occupied, in this case, a simple shelf, would have made my task immeasurably easier. Not so, it seems.

Resorting to an old cartoonist's trick, I even added taped-on labels to this, but to no avail. Even if here, or later in the book, these particular rectangles were clearly meant to be books, the drawing itself would seem to me now to be empty of any interest or meaning. What does such a scribble have to say? Well, nothing, really.

The idea of illustration for the kind of book my friend wrote has less to do with reproducing the characters or scenes than with adding little visual references and jokes that might comment on the text. Some of the drawings I sent in are pretty direct comments on the action, others, not. The novel is told in short chapters, each in the voice of a different employee of a bookstore, for the most part. Sometimes, specific books, real and imagined, are mentioned. I drew some real books, obviously
the easiest thing to do, and some invented ones, which was great fun. I also drew some objects common to the bookstore or to any bookstore or office: things like a stapler, of a cup of pencils and pens, and then placed these at the head of chapters told in the voice of the more practical, sensible sort of employees who might not only use such, but in a subtle way, I hope, be represented by these reliable tools. That may not be a clear concept to anyone but me, but there we are. At least, I hope the stapler will look like a stapler.

Some of the other little sketches that never made it to the point of submission were simply too densely detailed to not go all gray and unrecognizable when reproduced at a smaller size. Not the problem here. There was just nothing funny, or even good, about this one.

I am glad to be done, or as much done as I can be until better minds and hands take over the project again and try making something of the things I've sent. We'll see. For the time being at least, it feels right to tot up something of my own efforts to date. I would estimate that to get just the ones I've sent off required the making of half again as many finished drawings -- meaning more than just the innumerable quick doodles from which I then had to select workable ideas -- and that of the rejects, nearly all of them have been abandoned not because I couldn't manage a likeness, but because whatever I drew ended up looking flat and uninteresting to me. Setting aside the sheaf of paper wasted (and recycled) trying to draw keyboards and telephones -- neither of which I ever managed -- I'd have to say most of my failures on this project did not seem to me to be so bad until I'd finished, or nearly finished most of them. The technical problem of drawing things, when I normally draw faces, was perhaps the most satisfying part of this task, so much so that often, as here, I did not realize that I hadn't actually done much of anything worth bothering about until I'd already bothered. No loss.

I've enjoyed doing all these little drawings, mostly. I don't know that I liked having even so flexible a deadline as the one I gave myself for doing this. I'm not one for such pressures, even of my own creation, and I so don't won't to disappoint my friend, you see, or delay the publication of his book. The task did turn out to be bigger than I'd imagined, taking up far more of my time than I'd allotted when I agreed to do this at my friend's request. Still, did make me work, didn't it? Can't regret my failures along the way. Learned something from every one of those too, even if it was never again to try to draw a modern telephone, or that unidentified books on a shelf are not inherently interesting as a subject. I don't know, even now, that I'm satisfied with the results at all, but I do have a certain sense of accomplishment in being -- for now anyway -- done.