Blueberry Wanderings
I’ve been working on this project for quite some time. It’s a 32 page picture book for HarperCollins based on Neil Gaiman’s poem, ‘Blueberry Girl’. I’ll be finished with the paintings by the end of this month and then it will be a necessarily long wait for the actual book to be published.
Taking Neil’s lovely poetic medatation on the the inherent joys of a mother-daughter relationship and developing a compelling narrative impulse without robbing the poem of its highly symbolic nature was an interesting conceptual journey.
Here are a two of the original pencil drawings
I’ll be hand lettering the text on a seperat overlay.
Here are the painted versions:
I’ve a lot more paintings to go so I should head back to the drawing board now.
Between finishing up this project and preparing for the San Diego Comic-Con at the end of July its going to be a busy few weeks!
Enjoy,
Charles
July 6th, 2007 at 10:47 pm
Wow! That made my night. Now I wish I was going to San Diego. Alas the daily strip and the books have forced me to skip. Maybe next year.
Posted a link back on tomorrow’s strip. Hope you get some traffic. And is this book slated for Fall of ‘08?
July 7th, 2007 at 11:42 pm
Those paintings look amazing! I will defiently pick up one these books as soon as it’s released.
I have followed and loved your work for many years which made last night extra special for me. I discovered and purchased a three issue mini-series called The Book of Night. I hadn’t heard of it before. After flipping through it I felt so lucky to get all 3 issues for $ 4.00. It reminded me visually a lot of Ballads and Sagas which I loved.
I wish you the most success with Blueberry Girl and the upoming Stardust film.
July 8th, 2007 at 2:32 pm
Oh, Charles, how beautiful! I’m very much looking forward to seeing the finished “Blueberry Girl.”
July 9th, 2007 at 11:43 am
Very exciting … you and Neil Gaiman complement each other so well. I look forward to buying this for my wife so she can see why I treasure my comics so much.
March 31st, 2009 at 11:16 pm
[…] On his blog he said, “Taking Neil’s lovely poetic meditation on the inherent joys of a mother-daughter relationship and developing a compelling narrative impulse without robbing the poem of its highly symbolic nature was an interesting conceptual journey.” Which I think is Charles for “It wasn’t easy to make that poem into a picture book.” He did an astonishing job, but I still worried. I stopped worrying the day the assistant editor at HarperChildrens, who was herself pregnant, called me to let me know that she’d got the artwork in, and read it, and then started crying in the office. […]