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I dunno. Girl looks scary to me. Not often that I draw a picture that makes me burst into chuckles when I gaze on it. Poor doggie. I woke up with this illustration on my mind (I've been fermenting an idea for a new picture book starring these two) Click on the picture to check out the book cover mockup in my online portfolio and select the second thumbnail down.

Pencil was sketched directly onto Painter using the Cintiq, then faded the line back as a guide. On a second transparent layer used my favorite Painter pen -- the scratchboard tool -- to "ink" the drawing in brown. Next colored on the canvas layer with the digital watercolor, keeping it wet the whole time. Finished up modeling Bella's (the girl) face with the scratchboard rake. Probably could add some more modeling to Bronte's fur with the rake, but she was a "unique" looking cattle dog in real life (RIP my poor Bronte, who died last week) and I want to keep her DNA slighly ambiguous. Is she part pig? Part seal? Will have to think on this.

Okay, I found this over at Jessica Burkhart's blog and had to join in.


The Big Read, an initiative by the National Endowment for the Arts, has estimated that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed. How do you do?

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo


Twenty-Four - not bad

The Brontë sisters are three of my all-time, all-star favourite authors. I first read Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre when I was at school and was instantly bewitched by them, and have re-read them both often in the years since. Every time I read the Brontë sisters’ novels (not just those two) I find more in them to love. By the time you read this post, I will be in the midst of two long weeks off on holiday, and during that time I’m going to make my very first trip up to Howarth to see the parsonage where the girls lived with their brother and father - I can’t wait - talk about kid in a sweet shop! So, in celebration of this fact, today I bring you an excerpt from Janet Gezari’s 2007 book Last Things: Emily Brontë’s Poems.

[Elizabeth] Gaskell’s well-known image of the three sisters pacing up and down in the sitting room of the Parsonage while talking over their stories, reminds us that poems were not among the creative achievements shared during those evening sessions. When Charlotte, who knew that her sister wrote poems, came upon her Gondal Poems notebook in the autumn of 1845 and read some, Emily felt violated. Once persuaded to participate in Charlotte’s publication project, she readied only twenty-one of her poems for printing. In the 1846 volume, her poems usually alternate with those of her sisters, so that relations between her poems are subordinated to relations between them and the contiguous poems of Charlotte and Anne. All of the poems Brontë selected for publication in 1846 came from the two books into which she had begun transcribing some of her poems about a year earlier, the Gondal Poems notebook and the so-called Honresfeld manuscript. After transcribing her poems, she almost always discarded earlier drafts. Her single-leaf manuscripts preserve many apparently unfinished or incomplete poems, usually described as fragments, and we cannot know what she intended to do with them. The posthumous publication of seventeen more poems in the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey nearly doubled the number of Emily Brontë’s poems available to nineteenth-century readers. What knowledge we have about Charlotte Brontë’s aggressive editing of these poems relies on a comparison of the manuscript versions in Emily Brontë’s hand to the published versions and not on Charlotte Brontë’s correspondence with her publisher about the edition, which says nothing about her editorial judgements. 1850 added one poem to the canon for which no holograph manuscript survives, ‘Often rebuked, yet always back returning.’ For generations of Brontë readers, as for T. J. Wise and J. A. Symington, this poem has sounded ‘the keynote to her character’, yet its authorship continues to be disputed. In my last chapter, I argue that Charlotte, not Emily, is the author of ‘Often rebuked, yet always back returning,’ and that the poem promotes Charlotte’s view of Emily, not Emily’s view of herself or her own poetic project.

My title registers my starting place. A concern with endings, and with how we defy, resist, blur, or transcend them, characterizes Brontë’s life, her art, and this book. In Carson’s words, ‘She whached the bars of time, which broke.’ Brontë’s approach to an end is most evident when death or memory is the subject of a poem, as it so frequently is. But there is no poet for whom immortality resolves less, or for whom ordinary temporal elements—night, day, evening, fall and spring—are more miscible. She gives us a vision of life sub specie iterationis. Her poems’ formal resistance to endings can be seen in the recurrence of the word again both at the end of lines and at the end of poems, where it appears more often than any other word, disrupting our feeling that the experience the poem has recorded is over and done. Or in her fondness for circular structures and for outcomes that resemble openings rather than endings. If time is a prison that confines us, then Brontë’s poems return again and again both to the prison site and to the prison break. Although I do not discuss all her poems, the view of Emily Brontë’s poems presented here seeks to be comprehensive. It relates to individual poems, to the progress she made from the beginning of her career as a poet to its end, to her poetical fragments and her writing practice, to her motives for writing poetry, and to the connections between her poems and her famous novel. When Brontë’s ordinary life enters into my account of her poems, it does so to illuminate them, and not vice versa. I do not ignore the presence of Gondal in the poems, but I resist dividing poems that belong to a Gondal narrative from poems that probably do not, either because Brontë transcribed them into her Honresfeld manuscript instead of her Gondal Poems notebook or because they include no references to Gondal characters or places. A specious distinction between ‘Gondal’ and ‘personal’ narrative contexts continues to thrive, especially when biographical interpretations are at stake. Believing that a Gondal poem is less personal than a non-Gondal poem is like believing that The Bell Jar is less personal than ‘Daddy’. Although she separated Gondal poems from non-Gondal poems by transcribing them into separate notebooks, Brontë composed both kinds of poems intermittently for as long as she wrote poems. For me, a Gondal poem is one in which a lyrical impulse converges with an occasion provided by a narrative about invented characters with aristocratic names. One way to look at Gondal is as intentional dreaming, a release like the one we experience in a dream when the self is freed to act various roles, but always under the aegis of an informing self-idiom that organizes and unifies whatever experience is being represented. The chapters that follow endeavour to describe both the range and the distinctiveness of the experience Emily Brontë’s poems offer.

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