It contains behind the scenes by John Coulthart about Magical Landscapes and The Spirit Guide sections. Read the following to get it all!
Can you talk about your work for both Magical Landscapes and The Spirit Guide section?
What's about the approach, the process, the main difficulties you had to solve to balance text and image, and your favourite pieces...? Any anecdote or "odd" event while you worked on those illos? Can you share any preliminary or wip material?
John Coulthart: Magical Landscapes was the last part of the book to be completed although I did prepare all the borders early on, and I also fully illustrated the first page so that everyone could see how the section would look when it was finished. I left the section to last because there was so much illustration involved, I wanted to get everything else out of the way before immersing myself in the task.
The Spirit Guide was done earlier than this, and mostly in a collage style since a lot of antique pictorial reference was required: angels, the De Plancy demons, the John Dee "Watchtower" and so on. I thought
using collage might also save me some time but some of the pages took longer than I expected. I have plan illustrations of all the Dee Watchtowers in a booklet about Enochian magic where they're shown as simple line drawings but Alan and Steve wanted the chart to be one of the colour versions which I think were created by The Golden Dawn. All the online copies of these are small things in very over-saturated RGB colours so they're no use for print purposes. The only option was to make my own copy of one of the Watchtowers from scratch. Most of this has been covered over by the text but the whole design came in useful when I had to do the Enochian page for the Magical Landscapes.
Both sections were relatively easy to work on since the appearance and contents of each section was carefully described in the notes. The Magical Landscapes frame is based on an Alphonse Mucha design, the request being for pages that resemble Mucha's early illustrated books where framed illustrations are paired with panels of text. Mucha's books change their frames for each page, something I did consider for my sequence but for this book it seemed a better option to keep the shape of the frame consistent while changing the contents.
Alan had also provided small thumbnail sketches for each of the Magical Landscapes pages so one of the challenges was trying to stay as close as possible the guidelines. This worked well for most of the pages with the exception of Geburah where the sketched design had two narrow text panels running down the page with the figure between them. I tried several variations for this but in all of them the columns of text were crowding the figure who required space for her outstretched arms. The solution was to follow the form of the previous page, which also makes for a satisfying double-page layout, with two multi-armed figures facing each other. I also changed the Daath text panel from a rectangle to a circle since the text refers to Daath having pi as its numeral on the Tree of Life. Readers of Alan's other books may note that some of the imagery in the first eleven pages matches the symbolism that appears in the journey up the Tree of Life in Promethea. I don't think this was deliberate, more a result of the way that Alan imagines these spheres.
The biggest challenge was the request for the Fairyland page to be as crowded as one of Joseph Noel Patton's paintings which show hundreds of fairies and other creatures of all sizes and shapes gathered together in woodland scenes. My scene is crowded but seems less so when you look at Patton's paintings, each of which must have taken him about a year at least to create. I'm still pleased with the way my scene turned out, however. There's a tiny reference to Richard Dadd's fairyland in the figures from The Fairy Feller's Masterstroke. And I put an old view of Northampton in the background of the alchemy picture on the opposite page. This picture is based on the plates from the Splendor Solis series, many of which have little landscape scenes in their backgrounds.
Since I was doing the same here I thought I might as well use something relevant. I don't think I have any specific favourites but I like the way these pages look together, one of them visually noisy and detailed while the other is very calm and ordered.
The Enochian page presented another challenge since the description required a perspective view of one of Dee's Watchtowers, showing how the grid is formed by an arrangement of coloured pyramids with flat tops.
This was another reason for drawing out one of the Watchtowers for the Spirit Guide page; doing so gave me an accurate plan of the whole design in print-ready colours and with all the required Enochian symbols in place. This was done with vector graphics in Illustrator before being placed into the layered page. I use Illustrator all the time for design work, and usually find it easier and quicker when creating anything involving bold shapes or geometric constructions.[Regarding wip material] I've included extracts from the work-in-progress files for the Enochian pages. I'm usually reluctant to share sketches for the reasons that David Bowie once gave: sharing early stages of something has a tendency to change the reception of the final work, whatever it may be. But these drafts are more like diagrams, and they already exist outside the work as a whole. [See below!]
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