The Bloody Chamber

"I have seen the cage you are weaving for me; it is a very pretty one and I shall sit, hereafter in my cage among the other singing birds but I - I shall be dumb from spite."

The Erl King

"Every wolf in the world now howled a prothalamion outside the  window as she freely gave the kiss she owed him.

The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat. She laughed at him full in the face, she ripped off his shirt for him and flung it into the fire, in the fiery wake of her own discarded clothing. The flames danced like dead souls on Walpurgisnacht and the old bones under the bed set up a terrible clattering but she did not pay them any heed.

Carnivore incarnate, only flesh appeases him."

The Company of Wolves

"To these upland woodsmen, the Devil is as real as you or I. More so; they have not seen us nor even know that we exist, but the Devil they glimpse often in the graveyards, those bleak and touching townships of the dead where the graves are marked with portraits of the deceased in the naif stule and there are no flowers to put in  front of them, no flowers grow there, so they put out small, votive  offerings, little loaves, sometimes a cake that bears come lumbering from the margins of the forest to snatch away. At midnight, especially on Walpurgisnacht, the Devil holds picnics in the graveyards and  invites the witches; then they dig up fresh corpses, and eat them. Anyone will tell you that."

The Werewolf

These are three illustrations for Angela Carter's 'The Bloody Chamber'. You just can't beat a bit of Angela Carter. 

Hamelin

"And ere three shrill notes the pipe uttered,
You heard as if an army muttered;
And the muttering grew to a grumbling;
And the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling;
And out of the houses the rats came tumbling.
Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats,
Brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats..."

The Pied Piper of Hamelin, by Robert Browning

Our third project this semester was to produce a piece of self promotional material. I wanted something that should off both my 2D and 3D skills, but that wouldn't be too costly to produce and that could be sent by post. My tutors said keep it simple...yeah, that I ignored.

I have a taste for the macabre, if you hadn't already noticed. In real life I'm a happy person, but I guess I go to "the dark side" with my art. And macabre is at it's best in a good old, creepy fairy tale. I chose The Pied Piper of Hamelin because it's not so overdone as say Red Riding Hood, and it is certainly creepy. There's some vague factual basis to it; there genuinely was a lack of children in Hamelin in the thirteenth century. The tale begins to spread about a hundred years after. 

In the tale the Piper removes the rats from the town, but when the town does not pay him, he also takes the children. The reference to the rats links this tale to the plague, the rats would have bought it in and many would have died, particularly the young. The Piper is symbollic of death or the devil. This is a proper creepy tale, however it's told. 

So I chose to make a fold out card, with foreground and background images. This way, I got to show off some print making, and also have a three dimensional window display/stage set type element in it. It took hours of painstaking cutting to get this right, but it was definitely worth it. 

I used a yellow and black palette. I know yellow is usually associated with sunny dispositions, but I wanted to use it to create a sundown, flaming, feel against the shadowy rats.

And, of course, a piece of self promotion needs to have some information on it. 

It still needs a little tweaking, but I am really considering using this a promotion. What do you guys think? And does anyone know of somewhere in the south-east/London area that does laser cutting? Because my fingers will drop off if I have to cut many more of those rats out!!!

Wuthering Heights

 "Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire."

"'Ah, your favourites are among these?' I continued, turning to an obscure cushion full of something like cats.

'A strange choice of favourites!' she observed scornfully.

Unluckily, it was a heap of dead rabbits."

Another of my last university projects was titled 'Picturing Words', in which we had to choose a piece of text and illustrate it. I chose my favourite classic: Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. 

It's no wonder it hasn't been very illustrated before, it was a real challenge. It's a story of so many contradictions; essentially it's gossip told by Nelly Dean to Lockwood, but it's also some of the most beautiful writing in the English language. It's a story of revenge and cruelty, but also of all consuming love. After extensive experimenting I decided monoprinting was the way forward, and to have a mixture of both the famous grand scale pathetic fallacy and the smaller, macabre background scenes. My main goal was to produce atmospheric pieces that capture the book. It took a lot of development, but in the end I produced seven prints I was happy with; this is my interpretation of Wuthering Heights.

 

 

Development

"Wuthering' being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather. Pure, bracing ventilation they must have up there at all times, indeed: one may guess the power of the north wind blowing over the edge, by the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house; and by a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun."

"A sorrowful sight I saw: dark night coming down prematurely, and sky and hills mingled in one bitter whirl of wind and suffocating snow."

"That's a turkey's,' she murmured to herself; 'and this is a wild duck's; and this is a pigeon's. Ah, they put pigeons' feathers in the pillows - no wonder I couldn't die! Let me take care to throw it on the floor when I lie down. And here is a moor-cock's; and this - I should know it among a thousand - it's a lapwing's. Bonny bird; wheeling over our heads in the middle of the moor. It wanted to get to its nest, for the clouds had touched the swells, and it felt rain coming. This feather was picked up from the heath, the bird was not shot: we saw its nest in the winter, full of little skeletons. Heathcliff set a trap over it, and the old ones dared not come. I made him promise he'd never shoot a lapwing after that, and he didn't. Yes, here are more! Did he shoot my lapwings, Nelly? Are they red, any of them? Let me look.'"

"About midnight, while we still sat up, the storm came rattling over the Heights in full fury. There was a violent wind, as well as thunder, and either one or the other split a tree off at the corner of the building: a huge bough fell across the roof, and knocked down a portion of the east chimney-stack, sending a clatter of stones and soot into the kitchen-fire. We thought a bolt had fallen in the middle of us; and Joseph swung on to his knees, beseeching the Lord to remember the patriarchs Noah and Lot, and, as in former times, spare the righteous, though he smote the ungodly."

"In my flight through the kitchen I bid Joseph speed to his master; I knocked over Hareton, who was hanging a litter of puppies from a chair-back in the doorway; and, blessed as a soul escaped from purgatory, I bounded, leaped, and flew down the steep road; then, quitting its windings, shot direct across the moor, rolling over banks, and wading through marshes: precipitating myself, in fact, towards the beacon-light of the Grange. And far rather would I be condemned to a perpetual dwelling in the infernal regions than, even for one night, abide beneath the roof of Wuthering Heights again.'"

The Lure of the Stag

The Brief

Consider and identify what a journey could be. After a full brainstorm & thorough research, select a journey and illustrate it in an appropriate and compelling way.

Stu the Rabbit

This was my Final Major Project brief. My chosen journey was 'a journey through the woods'. I'm a country girl at heart. I've spent most of my life riding horses through forests; you see much more of the world from the back of a horse, wild animals don't run away so quickly, and you don't speed past the scenery at the pace you do in a car. 

Colin the Crow

I had to convince my tutors that this did constitute a proper journey; I mean, to me it was as good as any journey, but to them drawing trees and wildlife didn't quite cut it. So I wrote a story, the journey of a man who gets lost both physically and spiritually in the woods and of the creatures he encounters there:

"The journey from town to home is six miles of forest; just six miles, six miles long. But all it takes to lose your soul, is one footstep wrong. 

You go under the trees of a thousand faces, leering down at you with thick twisted malice, the trapped travellers who trod these tracks before you. You shiver as their hollow eyes follow your progress not seeing, but knowing your frailty. This upright and noble man, never stumbled, never sinned, is heading home to his wife. He's had a hard day of boxes and charts; he's had a hard life, of very few delights. "

Instead of conventional illustration, you know, pictures on pages, I chose to build models of the animals. I was working towards a scene that would fit a window display, as well as being applied (through photos) into a book form. The models are made out of wire and papier-mache. 

Jack the Fox

I also made twenty five moths out of wire and tissue paper. These were all hand stitched and took me an hour each! I'm not a massively patient person, but I just worked on them in the evenings whilst watching the tv. For the photos I attached them to fairy lights so that they glowed. 

 

In the end I painted a backdrop of a wood on my set, and these were the images I went with, but I also took my animals out for some fresh air.

Sally the Stag 

I've had the book made up by Blurb, and it is pretty swish if I do say so myself. You can preview it below, and, if you like it or want to read the whole story, you can even purchase your own copy.

The Lure of the Stag by Hannah Harding | Make Your Own Book

Let's Begin...

Illustrate: (verb) To provide something with explanatory or decorative features.

Today is the first day of the rest of my life. It feels just like any other day, except maybe a little less stressed than the last few months, the finals months of my degree. Honestly, I never really gave this day much thought, I never imagined I'd be living it. 

For the last three years whenever I've told people I'm studying illustration they've looked blankly at me and then asked 'so what will you do when you leave?'

'Well, illustrate, obviously.' I've replied. Illustration is not like a degree in English, or Geography, or Prehistoric-Modern-Anglo-Latin-Medieval-Computerised-Folklore; the job's pretty much in the title. Don't ask me what illustration is; yes, it is pictures in books and what not, but it's also got a lot more scope than that. And what do I want to illustrate? Well, at this point I'm a penniless graduate, I'll take whatever job I can right now! 

So that's that. Up until this point I've had a plan: do an illustration degree. But what next? All I know is that I don't want life to be predictable. I want to chase down adventure. I want life to be a showcase. 

The University of Hertfordshire's Degree Show, 2011.

Featuring Illustration (which is all amazing)

Featuring my work too!

Let's do this. 

If you are in Hertfordshire this week why not pop over to the university and check out the amazing degree show featuring work from Graphic Design & Illustration, Fine Art, Applied Arts, Fashion,  Photography and lot's lot's more.