CafePress – Page 6 – { feuilleton }

More Steampunk and the Crawling Chaos

Yes, it’s these again, and no, I’m not posting them because it Christmas (although you probably don’t believe that). This is the first opportunity I’ve had to add the designs to CafePress after letting them sit for a while seeing as they’re all still available on Modofly’s book range. I’ve had queries recently for the Steampunk designs as poster prints so these are now available in the usual CafePress sizes of large, small and mini. There’s also a range of CafePress t-shirts, and if you’d like one of those they have a bewilderingly extensive choice. The four pieces are:

• Steampunk | CafePress shop
• Steampunk Redux | CafePress shop
• Steampunk: Life in Our New Century! | CafePress shop
• Nyarlathotep: the Crawling Chaos | CafePress shop

While we’re on the subject of Coulthart merchandise, I haven’t mentioned that I’ve discontinued selling signed prints for the time being so CafePress is now the sole place to get a print of anything. I’ve been so busy recently that keeping up with print orders was becoming a serious problem, in addition to never having been very lucrative in the first place. CafePress has excellent printing and can produce things at a large size a lot more cheaply than I’d be able to manage. This doesn’t rule out signed prints altogether but in future they’ll probably be strictly limited editions, signed and numbered. Any developments along those lines will be announced here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• New Modofly books
• Nyarlathotep: the Crawling Chaos
• Steampunk Redux
• Steampunk framed
• Steampunk Horror Shortcuts

Return to Wonderland

As the festive season shambles into view I’ve reworked my psychedelic interpretation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland from calendar to poster format for those who might prefer the latter. There are two poster sizes, the standard CafePress large and small, and the calendar is still on sale, of course. By coincidence, the dreadfully-named Syfy channel is currently running its own TV adaptation of the Lewis Carroll books. I haven’t seen Alice but the reviews I’ve read have been mixed. From the description I can’t imagine I’d enjoy it (Tim Burton’s film is the one I’m waiting for) but it shows once again how endlessly mutable the Alice stories have become.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dalí in Wonderland
• Virtual Alice
• Psychedelic Wonderland: the 2010 calendar
• Charles Robinson’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
• Humpty Dumpty variations
• Alice in Wonderland by Jonathan Miller
• The Illustrators of Alice

Finch posters

I won’t say this is by popular demand but after persistent requests for posters of my cover art for Jeff VanderMeer’s latest novel, Finch, I’ve opened a new CafePress shop selling exactly that. The largest of these is 58.38cm x 82.55 (22.984″ x 32.5″) which should be big enough for most appetites. There’s also a smaller size 35.03cm x 49.53 (13.7904″ x 19.5″) and I’ve added some cards and postcards.

In Finch, mysterious underground inhabitants known as the gray caps have reconquered the failed fantasy state Ambergris and put it under martial law. They have disbanded House Hoegbotton and are controlling the human inhabitants with strange addictive drugs, internment in camps, and random acts of terror. The rebel resistance is scattered, and the gray caps are using human labor to build two strange towers. Against this backdrop, John Finch, who lives alone with a cat and a lizard, must solve an impossible double murder for his gray cap masters while trying to make contact with the rebels. Nothing is as it seems as Finch and his disintegrating partner Wyte negotiate their way through a landscape of spies, rebels, and deception. Trapped by his job and the city, Finch is about to come face to face with a series of mysteries that will change him and Ambergris forever.

Jeff is currently promoting Finch on his latest book tour, details of which can be found here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Finch

Psychedelic Wonderland: the 2010 calendar

So I had a bright idea at the end of September… Instead of rehashing old work for a CafePress calendar design, I thought I’d try something new. I hadn’t done any artwork for myself all year, everything I’d been working on was a commission of some sort. In addition to that, I’d spent a large portion of the year delving deeper into the psychedelic music of the late Sixties, especially the wealth of obscure British bands to be found on the seemingly endless series of compilations which have trickled out over the past two decades. Everyone is familiar with Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit but, as I’ve noted before, themes from, and allusions to, the Alice books run through British psychedelia to an even greater degree. The Beatles put Lewis Carroll in their pantheon of influences on the cover of Sgt. Pepper, and Wonderland’s atmosphere of Victorian surrealism chimed perfectly with a resurgence of interest in Victorian art and design.

So at the end of September, mulling over ideas, I picked up one of my Lewis Carroll volumes and looked at the chapter list: 12 chapters…12 months…I could do a psychedelic Alice in Wonderland! The only drawback was being weighed down by ongoing work which meant that anything I did would have to be created quickly and easily. I reckoned it was manageable if I put a few rules in place first: try and rough out a chapter a day; make copious use of clip art decoration and scanned engravings; keep things bold and florid without worrying too much about fidelity to minor story points. In theory I could do the whole thing in about two weeks if I kept on schedule. As it turns out the whole thing took me three weeks as I got increasingly involved with illustrating the story. You can see the results below and larger copies of the pictures here. Two years ago I was saying I probably wouldn’t ever illustrate Lewis Carroll. That was true at the time since I couldn’t find an approach to the stories that would sustain my interest and (possibly) bring something new to the books. Seeing Alice’s adventures through the psychotropic prism of the late Sixties showed me the way into Wonderland. What’s needed now is to do the same next year for Looking-Glass Land. Watch this space.

Some notes on the pictures follow below.

Update: By popular demand, this calendar is now available again.

Continue reading “Psychedelic Wonderland: the 2010 calendar”

New Modofly books

Steampunk: Life in Our New Century!

I’m behind on work updates again. Still being very productive on a range of different fronts—mostly book and CD design as usual—but the workload means that site updates tend to suffer. Anyway…

This new Steampunk illustration was a quick piece done at the weekend to accompany an article Jeff VanderMeer is writing. The collage came out better than expected considering it was pretty much slammed together in an afternoon. Coincidentally, the same weekend there was a request from Modofly for new designs to adorn their range of bespoke notebooks. The last Modofly design I produced was also a Steampunk one (depicting Jeff’s Steampunk formula) so I quickly worked this up into a new book design. I’ve also slightly reworked the Nyarlathotep design done earlier this year so it fits Modofly’s book format. When I get the time I’ll be making some Cafepress products from these designs; I’d like to see both of them as posters for a start.

Update: Jeff’s article, which includes two of my illustrations, is now posted here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Nyarlathotep: the Crawling Chaos
• Steampunk Redux
• Steampunk framed
• Steampunk Horror Shortcuts