Ah some good news to brighten my afternoon! My `The Cunning Man' painting is now on display at the Discworld Wiki site. While I know it's not exactly a lucrative publishing deal, as an amateur & aspirational artist to have one of my little pieces of work chosen for illustration purposes thrills me to bits!
ReplyDeleteI had all but forgotten about this!
Anyway, to cut the story short I recently went to check the Wiki page out to see if my image is still there: it isn’t.
Out of curiosity I checked the page ‘history’ to see why! There is some discussion amongst the site’s contributors about the painting not being good enough for their Wiki page and how it fails to meet (in their minds) the correct description of the character. Fair enough, each to their own. I can’t argue the artistic merits (or lack of), of my attempt, however I would say that there are reasonably accurate visual references to what might have been a ‘Witch Finder’ in the English Civil War period! In Terry Pratchett’s novel ‘I Shall Wear Midnight’ there is only minimal reference given to the character’s appearance, one notable characteristic however is that he has no eyes, just holes where they should have been! I accept that there are differing interpretations of how a witchfinder might appear; perhaps the Wiki page people might refer to something along the lines of a Spanish Inquisition type of character?
I didn’t request that my little interpretation be placed on their site, somebody there chose it.
But anyway, the site’s editors refer to one of the contributors there who is sighted as an example of a good illustrator, the writer makes special reference to this artist’s interpretation of Angua as a depiction that ‘can’t be beaten’! Based on that particular critique, I just had to go and check the picture out! What I found was a (well drawn, well executed) image of a fairly generic semi-clad young woman. The trouble is it could be of ANY semi-clad young woman, (a 1980s ‘Page 3’ model perhaps?). How on Earth this was in any way an example of an accurate depiction of the particular character (Angua), and my little digital sketch, in the eyes of the editors was not, beggars belief!