Billy's Oak
- BILLY'S OAK - . . .A scratchboard drawing, size 8.5 x 11. It appears in the book, "The Compleat Crow," by Brian Lumley, published by Ganley in 1987.
Before I drew this picture I went outside to look at the trees on my property, hoping that one of them had the right kind of branch on which to hang poor Billy. The time of year was just right, all the leaves were gone, just like in the story. One of the trees looked good for my purpose but I happened to look past it to the neighbors yard where he had a row of thin trees that in the summertime acted like a fence between our yards. But now they were all bare, skinny trunks sticking out of the ground, along with some bare bushes between them. And when I stepped off to one side a little, this scene popped into my mind.
Back at my drawing board I drew a sketch of that "mental picture" on tracing paper, working out the basic composition of Billy hanging from the tree. I then transferred that scene onto a scratch-board sheet and inked it in. After which, I decided to add the border. Up to now it was all rather easy to do.
The hard part was deciding where to put each skinny branch throughout the scene. I was also concerned with the spaces between them, which was just as important. With scratchboard, once I inked in a trunk, or a branch, there was no erasing it if it didn't look right.
My goal was to create a wall of thin, tangled trees and branches in the background that would look natural and beautiful, not messy. And to my frustration, it always seemed to need another branch! Here, there, there, I finally shouted STOP! . . . and put the pen away.
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