Guinevere & Lancelot
- GUIEVERE & LANCELOT - A black ink and gray pencil drawing on a 9 x 16 illustration board. It appears as a wrap-around cover on the booklet, "Guinevere & Lancelot," by Arthur Machen, published by The Purple Mouth Press in 1986.
After publication, Ned Brooks the publisher, made a comment in his fanzine indicating that he did not see any relevance in my cover art to the contents of the booklet, but decided to use it anyway. Well, it's true that my cover drawing does not illustrate a specific scene from the title story (there are several stories in the booklet) but it was not intended to be a "specific" scene; I designed the wraparound cover so that the scene on the front and the scene on the back were independent of each other, with both images "representative" of the contents; the image on the front cover is a collection of objects representing the title story, "Guinevere & Lancelot," while the back cover image represents items found in the other stories.
I did not respond to Ned's comment at the time because it's no big deal, but I thought I'd mention it here to point out that an illustrator does have those two approaches, "specificity" and "representation," to consider.
Another magazine editor once phoned to tell me that the scene I drew for a story he sent me to illustrate was not in the story; in the story, one of the chapters ends with a man in a hotel room packing his bags in readiness to go to the spaceport to board a spaceship. The next chapter opens with the man already aboard the spaceship. My idea for the drawing was to "bridge" those two chapters by showing the man holding his suitcase and walking the tarmack toward the spaceship. So, I argued, that though the scene I drew was not actually described in the story, it can be assumed that it did happen and was therefore a legitimate representation of the story. The editor was convinced and decided to use the drawing.
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