Meet Fanny

and Bee, and Harold, and Tilly

Fanny, the landlady of The Greyhound

My fingernails are black with ink, my right arm grey because it’s the closest thing to my brush to remove excess paint, and my desk stained in all the colours. Spread in front of me are three jars of water, from clean to very muddy, and various palettes, one for watercolours for the colours I need a lot of, another for colours that I need in smaller quantities, one for acrylic inks, and cheap pill boxes which serve as inkwells for my Indian ink in varying states of dilution. Bits of masking tape stick to the desk and floor having been carefully pulled from my drawings, drawings which now hang from many clips on a frame next to me to dry and to remind me where I’m at, and there are rubber crumbs everywhere. There’s a pot for the paintbrushes I’m using today, another for dip pens, and another for pencils and other pens I might use. There’s a sheet of sturdy kitchen paper to soak up extra paint, and an abandoned drawing on the same kind of paper where I test the colours and their density before I commit them to the as yet unabandoned drawing. I don’t know how it happened, but it’s 3 o’clock and I feel like I’ve only been here an hour or two, although I’ve been here since I got up at 9.

I’m working on the illustrations for a middle-sized story which a handful of you saw the first half of last year. I got interrupted by work, and I lost momentum on it. When I went back to it, I didn’t like the illustrations enough, so have started them again. They were an experiment in coloured pencils, which I had almost never used, but coloured pencils are not a Lucy thing. I like some of the illustrations I did in the pencils, but I couldn’t sustain the thrill of doing them for a whole book’s worth of images. Ink and watercolour, however, do keep me thrilled. Ink and watercolour are where I go to feel both safe and challenged, where I can concentrate on getting it right, accepting happy accidents, trusting myself, and never knowing what the hell the watercolours will do, especially Winsor & Newton Payne’s Grey, the best of the greys, but the most capricious.

The story needed to be tweaked a bit, too, in order to finish writing the second half with a bit more oomph. The second have will have to wait a little while longer to be written, though, because I’m having too much fun building this little world of mine in ink. I think I’ll make it into an actual honest to goodness book.

Anyway, that’s all I can tell you this week, because there’s nothing in my brain at the moment apart from soot black ink, watercolour spidering across wet paper, and bright pops of acrylic ink to tie it all together.

Baby Bee and her (useless) Drones

Harold, the theatre manager

Tilly, the smutty entertainer

Meanwhile, there are some new stories in the Story-Off, of terrible goings on in Portugal!