The Hound of the Baskervilles

I absolutely love illustrating books. Covers, chapter headers, interior illustrations of all kinds. I love taking a chunk of text, extracting the symbolic elements, the mood and emotional landscape, then distilling all of that down into visual metaphor. It's a process I find gratifying.

There are different ways to work with text and image and each one comes with it's own set of rules and restrictions, if you will. In graphic novels, for example, we say "never write what you've drawn." In other words, the images should never repeat the dialogue and vice versa. So dialogue becomes less an explanation or description of what's happening and more of an expression of a character's inner world and voice. My background in graphic novels informs my approach to book illustration. I love to draw what's not said or what's only being hinted at in the text. The brilliant jazz musician and composer Miles Davis once said "Don't play what's there. Play what's not there." and I believe this is what elevates an illustration from pretty good to truly amazing.

Here is an illustration I created for The Hound of the Baskervilles by A. Conan Doyle.

"The room had been fashioned into a small museum, and the walls were lined by a number of glass-topped cases full of that collection of butterflies and moths the formation of which had been the relaxation of this complex and dangerous man. In the centre of this room there was an upright beam … To this post a figure was tied, so swathed and muffled in the sheets which had been used to secure it that one could not for the moment tell whether it was that of a man or a woman. … In a minute we had torn off the gag, unswathed the bonds, and Mrs. Stapleton sank upon the floor in front of us.

“Thank God! Thank God! Oh, this villain! See how he has treated me!” She shot her arms out from her sleeves, and we saw with horror that they were all mottled with bruises … "

I wanted to create an illustration of Beryl Garcia, aka Mrs. Stapleton, but one that would get at the heart of her experience in the book. Something that would invoke the violence and the silencing she experiences at the hands of her husband, her oppressor and abusor. Most of the moths depicted here are endemic to Costa Rica where she grew up while the rest can be found in English moors similar to the setting of the book:
       Therinia Transversaria
       Eumorpha Fasciatus
       Isognathus Caricae
       Xylophanes Cyrene
       Noctuidae Agaristinae
       Dirphia Horcana
       Pyrgus Oileus

I am working on more book covers for real clients and dream clients! If you like this one, keep your eyes peeled. There will be more to come...