I am trying to illustrate all of the 'The Gladys Elegies' by Barbara Nickel. Shown below is what I have finished so far for the first letter. I am going to start on the other seven letters and continue to re-work all of them as I go. I will have more work in progress posted in the next few weeks.



Here is another of my illustrations that I was working on last week.

I found yet another artist that I admire... Emily Ryan. Her website is so funny! Shown below is one of her works .

Emily Ryan's Gold Flake Girl

This is one of my favourite drawings I have done in the last year. It is based on The Gladys Elegies by Barbara Nickel. The book opens with a sequence of letters back and forth between two twin sisters. These letters are sonnets based on the fictionalized lives of twins Gladys Muriel and Marion Carol Rungee. I liked how the author wrote about the relationship between twins, as it is an unknown relationship for most people. Nickel uses very feminine and pretty words, but the entire story is quite violent and dark. It is beautiful!

Here is the original sketch of the twins, as I see them from Nickel's work.

Then I added the girls into the forest... The first letter Marion, 1935: To My Twin Sister reads, "The Hudson River, where we used to fish in freckled rushes damp against our skirts; its water like a silk scarf wound a hush around our guarded chatter, laced with hurt. I fashioned our escapes. We slid from naps unnoticed to the woods and narrow path; the junipers whose crusty tears of sap seemed like our own. . . We clasped our hands and cast for rainbow trout. You hauled one in-I raised the stick and hit its judging eye, like Father's, shot with soot. We battered it a hundred times in mud; out petticoats emblazoned with its blood."

I want to illustrate all the letters, I think there are about eight in total. The letters are written back and forth between the twins throughout their lives; from the first one as young girls and eventually into old age.