Little Angel

“The Midnight Hare” paintings are more or less finished, and over the next two weeks I will be setting up the scans for Martins the Printers, who are over in Spittal, a place which looks out over the faintly coal-tinted North Sea; then as far as this book is concerned it is the business side of things that will be uppermost. I have spent so long on the Hare book that I am timorous of bring the process of creating it to an end.  However, now that it is moving into a new phase, in the background I think perhaps maybe possibly a new book is waiting in the wings. A winter book.  Since the story is not written yet, I shall say nothing about it. But already I am thinking of what form the illustrations will take. The drawing above, an old Christmas card, is in pencil on white paper. I like the grubbiness of the pencil when it is reproduced. But I have been looking at that beautiful painting “Hunters in the Snow”, apparently the first painting of deep winter in western art. I shall start on a text, and say no more, and the text will suggest the technique.