A New Semester

Door, from Neil Gaiman’s “Neverwhere.”

I guess the best way to start this blog is to introduce myself:  I’m Corrie, an illustration student at Winthrop University, and this is my senior thesis blog.  I’ll be using this to write about my creative processes in making what will eventually become my completed senior thesis.  How exciting!

I started thinking about what I wanted to do for my senior thesis after I passed specialization review (SPR) as a sophomore.  For the longest time, I had no ideas.  Zero.  Up until this summer, I was really starting to think I was heading into a pretty difficult semester full of decisions I wasn’t sure I was ready to make yet.  So in true ostritch fashion, I stuck my head in the sand, otherwise known as a good fantasy novel escape experience.  That book was called Neverwhere, written by Neil Gaiman (he’s quite a well-known British author, but for those unfortunate people who aren’t familiar with him, he’s responsible for Coraline, Good Omens, the Sandman graphic novel series, the screenplay for the film Mirrormask, and a number of other creative works).  For a good two weeks or so, I was completely taken with the world of Neverwhere, and that did not change upon my completion of the novel.  I wanted to go back and read it again; I wanted to read more about the London Underground.

Unfortunately for me, there were no sequels to be had.  But then I had an idea.  While I was reading the novel, I had the clearest pictures in my head of what each of these characters and their surroundings looked like, thanks to the rich descriptions Gaiman offered.  It was then that I made my decision:  all I wanted to do was to re-create the pictures in my head on paper.

That’s how I came around to deciding what to do for my senior thesis.  I would like to create 10-15 full illustrations for the novel.  Ideally, they’d be the kind of illustrations found in full-color inserts on the opposite page of the scenes they represented, probably published with a caption at the bottom of the image in the margin.  Naturally, I don’t intend to print an entire book to have as my final product.  Instead, I would like to display the final piece as art prints, mounted or kept in a portfolio.  I’m thinking about using colored inks and watercolors, and, as colored inks aren’t pigmented, they have been known to fade when displayed near sunlight.  That said, I’m going with large prints for my final display piece, to avoid fading colors.  I’m also considering doing the backgrounds for these pieces in oil paints on canvas, while drawing and painting the characters with inks, and then cutting and pasting them to the canvas background.  I’m not sure how this will look (it may look cooler in my head than it does on paper/canvas), and I’m also not sure how much time it’ll take me, so that idea is really not solid yet.  Even so, this is where I am in my thought process for this project right now.  I’m really looking forward to solidifying my ideas and working through this senior thesis in the upcoming school year!