Bins hates it when I’m working on illustrations. “You’re so booooring when you’re drawing!” he exclaims. According to him, if I’m painting or writing, I am human. When I’m working on children’s book illustrations, however, I reveal my True Form: a purple-faced storm cloud who speaks in muttered thunder-claps and abrupt flashes of lightning.
Unfortunately, this is only too true. I’ve been preparing to work on the current book for the past 10 months. It’s only about 20 pages long, with a single line of text on each page. You would think that such a pint-sized project would literally leap out of my hands and bounce into this world! But, no: that’s not how it is for me. For all this time that I’ve been assembling the drawings in pencil I’ve remained relatively human. Now that I’m ready to colour-in the results? The thundercloud begins to show through.
My editors, Tulika Books, are based in Chennai and have the patience of Bodhisattvas. They have been sending me friendly nudges and encouraging reminders all year long. I have been responding with equal friendliness, with hopeful chirps and occasional sketches. I always imagine that I can squeeze the drawings in between other deadlines: an article here, a story there, but it rarely works out smoothly. There’s the weekly deadline for this Elsewhere column and the cartoon deadline one day later. There are the ups and downs of semi-social life, with Bins and Kookie to keep me company and visits to my sister or outings with Muriel. Everything takes time.
I am often told me that my drawings look as if I “had fun making them.” Maybe so. Doesn’t feel like fun, though. As with every other illustrated book I’ve worked on, the first couple of months are entirely taken up with fussing about paper: deciding on what surface I want to draw; making false starts; feeling convinced that I cannot draw even a curved line, never mind a straight one; starting again. Just drawing the frame lines for the pages takes months. Eventually I decide that it’s best to do all the rough drawings on tracing paper, after which I trace them off onto expensive watercolour boards.
But in order to share the drawings with Tulika, I need to scan the rough artworks and send them by email. The double-page drawings are too big to fit on my flat-bed scanner. So I get a dinky hand-held. Then it’s time to finalise the text. There’s a patch of story that I want to change, however. That means the text no longer matches the drawings. And so on and on. More months fly past. Finally I send the text and fresh scans off to Tulika. More adjustments.
At long last, the drawings have migrated from tracing paper onto the watercolour board. I have marshalled my troops: paints, pencils, water-soluble pencils, inks, felt-tip pens, white ink. I am ready for the final assault but my nerve fails me: I’m desperate to complete the project yet I’m so sure I’ll fail that I don't want to start and — “You see?” says Bins. “Completely booooring!” Whereupon I set fire to his eyebrows, howl at the moon, return to my desk and start colouring.
Manjula Padmanabhanauthor and artist, writes of her life in the fictional town of Elsewhere, US, in this weekly column
Last episode: End game
Next episode: Cold peril