Twenty.Twenty. Four.
Books, covers, piles of drawings…
It has been a year (a whole entire year) of saying the thing about how quickly this year has been passing and hearing yourself sound a bit Frankie Howerd about it. Now suddenly it’s the last few days of December (optional mind blown emoji and ‘ooooh noooo’ exclamation here). Just over a year ago I participated in ‘The Imagined Book Cover Challenge’ for 2023. Do you remember my designs? The Midnight Elephant was definitely my favourite. I’ve put a link to the Substack about those illustrations at the bottom of this page.
I don’t think I can overstate how important this small but daring act of participation was. It flipped an inner dormant switch (I didn’t even know I had). The nervousness of posting that first submission (‘One Lemon Too Many’)was quickly eased away by the sense of shared endeavour and kind, specific feedback (not empty niceness - which I will also happily take - here, I felt my drawings were really ‘seen’). That settled it, I immersed wholeheartedly in each of the seven day’s challenges. By the end of it, I had seven slightly wonky but progressively improving (in sevenths) portfolio pieces. Shortly after that challenge, I found that the same creative collective were running a monthly illustration challenge. No hesitation, I was IN. My first entry for that next challenge (#apinchandapunchclub)is also linked below.
The last #apinchandapunchclub happened at the beginning of October. I wrote on my IG wall, that I felt a bit emotional and all over the place about it being over. This and The Imagined Book Cover Challenge were such important sparks creatively for me, as well as something of a revelation in the celebration of little milestones and the power of communities cheering each other on.
In amongst A Pinch And A Punch Club, I developed my illustration style - or let the unvarnished way my drawings come out of me on paper be a bit more present in my digital image making. That felt (and still feels) big to me. My (insatiable) healthy hunger to improve is still alive and well, there’s so much more I want to do with my drawings and illustration, so much refinement I see the potential for. A Pinch And A Punch Club was the nutritional companion to the illustrationy things I’ve been working out through this year, the fuel needed to keep me on this quest. During the ten months (I think it was a year really, but I joined in from January 2024) I also fashioned a little handful of tiny handmade books.
Because of that engagement in process-to-finished-piece, over and over, by the time this October arrived, I felt myself nervously ready to start working on an actual useful-to-a-human sized book. No way did I feel ready for that skills-wise or mindset-wise ten months ago.
So, the timing of the end of this brilliant challenge was also perfect. It coincided with a sense within myself of it being time for me to stop with the externally set challenges. I was feeling the need for a bit of quiet, space and time to gather up references and ingredients for creating a ‘something’ new of my own making. So I backed off social media posting and scrolling for a bit and got back to drawing on paper and allowing myself uninterrupted thinking time. A ‘something’ has been quietly growing.
Before we get into the new, I love things like projects to be tied up in neat bundles. Sometimes creative endeavours end in a sort of flattening and fizzling out. You suddenly get sick of an idea or feel intolerant of the thought of investigating anything more in it for even a single second more and drop it. The process-to-finished-piece habit I’ve been cultivating over this year has been such a good discipline for forcing completion. So, when the cycle of the year brought me back round to The Imagined Book Cover Challenge for 2024, even though I said I wouldn’t engage with any more externally set tasks: it was too tempting. I couldn’t resist the possibility of a full circle tying up with a bow...
So here, I give you my 2024 imagined book covers. I upcycled lots of my existing art works from other things as a work around for feeling so time stretched (and post viral after flu this autumn). Because of this being my way of working, the challenge wasn’t stretching and rewarding in the same way as that first year. Honestly I felt a little flat about my entries. It felt a bit like cheating at times (even though ALL of the artworks are my own. Go figure). But, this week’s challenge did give me a chance to reflect upon the quantity of art I’ve made this year, because of the catalytic kick of that first Imagined Book Covers Challenge. By way of the ‘tying up bow’ I put all of the books covers together into a little book, with all of the thoughts I wrote each day about the entries.
This little book might possibly be the last book I make only one copy of - I would really like to begin to make multiples of whatever little books come into existence in my hands next year, so that I can share more of my illustrations and writings in a tangible, holdable form.
2024 has been a fast, merciless and unrelenting time with a lot of emotional twists and external stressors. Also financial pressure which has kept me attending various grindstones that are not necessarily related to illustration (or even creativity) but that pay the mortgage and car loan and for the food and fuel I insist on indulging in every week. I’m lucky to have the work, lucky to have a home. I know I’m not alone in having multiple jobs at the moment, lots of others are feeling the pinch too. Oof. It has felt like a lot - is all I’m saying! Amongst all of the crazy and pressure I’ve been constant in my drawing and thinking and pushing my creative practice outwards, constant in meeting myself on the page daily. Though at times I have been weepy with tiredness this month (and at various moments this year) it feels good too, to recognise the significant pile of drawings, mini books, cards, my first 16 page zine and a matchbox book that have all emerged from my never-still drawing hands over the last twelve months.
I’m really looking revelling in a bit of quiet over the Christmas/Winter break and to sharing some of the new ‘somethings’ I’ve been quietly noodling at, with you.
I hope that amongst the frenetic festivities you have some time for quietude and gentle reward (whatever that looks like for you)for the progress of this year and some meaningful togetherness (if that’s your thing too).
Oh and PS, on the weepy stuff, we can all be tired and weepy AND feel grateful AND optimistic - and I DO, all at the same time (or just a second later). That’s just the flavour of the ride in December sometimes.
Burnout and out
Susannah X
See Imagined Book Covers Challenge 2023 here.
See A Pinch And A Punch Club January entry here
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The Imagined Book Cover Challenge 2024
7. They Call Me Wild Cactus
I think this one would be some sort of a farce about a cactus in a Nordic forest,
who relentlessly sidles (like a crab) up to the pines and announces ‘They Call Me Wild Cactus’… This would happen multiple times until finally one of them responds…
I quite like the idea of minimally expressive faces on the trees. Just eyes (or even bolder no eyes, just expressive silhouettes) so they keep a kind of profound mystery to themselves. And I like the idea of the trees having their own language so that there is a theme of misunderstanding or the cactus never quite being able to get his sense of who he is across.
Something here about confidence and context and senses of self. How minimally and mysteriously could that be examined? Is controlled confusion a good outcome for a reader? Would it keep them coming back for more?
6. The Lute Player
A Dachshund playing a Lute…
Something of the Tudor silhouette about Dachshunds. (I’ve been watching Wolf Hall and noticing how gratifyingly top heavy Tudor styling is for the men especially, Great massive Robes and Thick draping cloaky-coats above tiny little skinny tight-clad legs. Good hats also).
As my own Dachshunds prefer to go naked, I’ve honoured their lifestyle choices by letting this Lute player wear nothing but the Lute…
5. Gumball and Duncan Butternut
As I drew these two (from the small gathering of matchbox sized ugly ceramic dogs I have on the bookshelf, often the subjects for warm up sketching) I thought about the idea that if you can have actual races with hobby horses, then surely there is a world in which ceramic dogs of questionable provenance meet in a crufts/dog-show kind of situation.
In that world: Duncan and Gumball are well known on the circuit. Always juuuust missing out on the big prizes. 3rd prize a familiar point of pain for them…
4. Mr Philpot's Mushrooms
(5th December 2024)
As this entry falls on Krampus Nacht and St Nicholas’s Eve and the night of all sorts of peculiar beings following St Nic on his rounds, tonight’s book cover story is of an impish elfish character who wanders where he shouldn’t and finds all manner of things.
I don’t think the imp is Mr Philpot (but he might be)…
Putting the mushrooms in a jar made me think of Alice and the shrinking and gargantuating effects of the potions she drank and what a weird world human-land must be to an elf, if he has never been here…
3. A house in the Peppertree
Oof! Eek… A late posting of this one… Just in under the wire for day three.
Found this tricky! Drawing lots of pepper grinders as trees yesterday and lots of trees with pepper clouds as the foliage… None of it worked. And… then this one emerged.
I think the Pepper loving rat is planning to move into the house, bringing his one possession with him - a Pepper (and the Pepper truck for transporting the Pepper)…
2. Lester Bocconcini goes Fishing
This one would be a slow burn story…
Lester will spend a lot of time (page after page) twitchily reacting to little movements of his fishing rod, false alarms…
Gradually he will be enticed down the cliff.
I think it might be a quite grizzly end, or atleast a Jeremy Fisher type situation (Remember the terrifying trout in the Beatrix Potter story). Hopefully Lester will make it home, but he will need to do some fast thinking…
This one feels a bit more ‘me’ than my entry yesterday. Good to produce work sometimes that feels sort of outside the usual remit, but this feels more comfortable to me (even if poor old Lester isn’t going to be)
1. The King's new Crocodile.
I think the story is about a tyrannical king who is impossible to placate, the people of the kingdom try everything.
They have no choice but to acquiesce to his peculiar demands, including his desire to fill his palace with fierce beasts.
Meanwhile the Croc family are beside themselves with worry about their very gentle, uncharacteristically herbivorous offspring...
I like the idea of the softness of the relationship that develops between man and beast being given away on the cover, only for the reader to find an unexpectedly unpleasant and vicious us King at the beginning of the story…
Love the weird ideas this challenge inspires!
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