Silly Ladies

Graphite on Stonehenge paper, 2019. Colored digitally.

One of my favorite scenes from The Lives of Christopher Chant is this quiet one, where Christopher plays on a beach with giggly mermaids nearby. It's a simple pleasure for a young boy to enjoy building sandcastles on the beach. The boy has no idea that his ability to travel to other worlds - which he calls "Anywheres" - requires an incredibly rare gift of magic. When others discover his unique ability, it garners the attention of both good and evil magic users and drastically changes the course of his formerly solitary life.

After the successful drawing experiment in the illustration “Millie,” I was excited to start this one. I used the same method of pencil on very thick, toothy Stonehenge paper. It’s not a very forgiving medium; using an eraser quickly causes damage to its surface, so I slowly built the layers up. I love the piece as a monochrome image, but I also enjoyed coloring it digitally once the drawing was complete, taking inspiration from color palettes in the works of Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac.

Excerpt from The Lives of Christopher Chant, by Dianna Wynne Jones:

He went to the Anywhere with the silly ladies several times. It had blue sea and white sand, perfect for digging and building in. There were ordinary people in it, but Christopher only saw them in the distance. The silly ladies came and sat on rocks out of the sea and giggled at him while he made sand castles.

"Oh clistoffer!" they would coo, in lisping voices. "Tell uth what make you a clistoffer." And they would all burst into screams of high laughter.

They were the only ladies he had seen without clothes on. Their skins were greenish and so was their hair. He was fascinated by the way the ends of them were big silvery tails that could curl and flip almost like a fish could, and send powerful sprays of water over him from their big finned feet. He never could persuade them that he was not a strange animal called a clistoffer.