(no subject)
'The gentleman offered his services, and perceiving that her modesty declined what her situation rendered necessary, took her up in his arms without farther delay, and carried her down the hill'
Such a very long time since the last update! There has not been much of significance other than my working away at the Sense and Sensibility illustrations. There was yet another small hiccup when it turned out that the editor and art director had laid the book out for twenty silhouettes (aside from the eleven colour plates), when we had in fact agreed upon ten. By that stage, it would have been a disaster to try to reconfigure the whole thing. As the silhouettes were needed first, that rather unexpectedly doubled workload meant that I ended up spending more time on the silhouettes than planned, leaving much less than desired (in an already very tight schedule) for the colour plates.
Meanwhile, my struggles with an apparently astray muse, vanished confidence and seemingly regressing skills continued. All in all, I began to suspect that I seemed to be hexed with never being allowed to illustrate Austen well, however dearly I wished it so.
But, in spite of everything, now that the project is very nearing completion, I can allow myself to say that I think this has been a better effort overall than the last time I approached Austen for Folio; and that has to count for something! I only hope pray that I might at least equal this with all the other Austen volumes Palazzo has lined up for me. I certainly hope that all the stumbles we had with this book will have been eased out by then!
I finished this illustration of Willoughby carrying Marianne on Monday night and thought I would post some of the progress stages too. I have only one colour plate left to work on now.
Detail
