DOS & DON'TS

Thank God there's somebody out there who's fighting the racist and stereotypical view that the only people who cannibalise children these days are warlords from Liberia. Comments/Enlarge | See all

You’d think that a harsh chemical perm and three hours in a tanning bed would do at least a little damage to a zombie’s tender, rotting flesh. But nope. Comments/Enlarge | See all

		BEN CHO This is a group of 16-year-old quadruplet...

		UPWARDS AND ONWARDS Edwyn Collins and His Birds of Recovery

		SUCK ON THIS Dan Colen Chews Our Ears Off About His Gu...

		STUFF LIKE THAT She Was Born to Be My Unicorn ...

IN THE MAGAZINE


Portrait by Ben Rayner

WOMEN HOLDING STRANGE CREATURES

Drawings by Quentin Blake

These drawings grew from a set of pictures that I did a few years ago of children talking to strange creatures on beaches. They were a bit like illustrations to unwritten stories by E. Nesbit. Then when
I revisited them more recently I discovered that the girls had become women, either in or out of their clothes (nice for me because you don’t get much opportunity for that in children’s books, which is what I spend a lot of my time doing), and the relationships with the creatures had got more complicated. Part of the pleasure of doing these is the feel of drawing with a reed pen on watercolor paper. There aren’t any preliminary drawings, I just start off and find out as I draw what the creature is going to be like, and discover something about the strange relationship. I don’t really know beforehand. Most of the time the women seem to be in charge—whatever the significance of that is. One of my friends said she found them “hilarious and slightly alarming.” See what you think.

A P Watt Ltd on behalf of Quentin Blake