Jul 28, 2016

DADLAND - Keggie Carew

Dadland is a spellbinding journey through the shady corners of history, an eccentric English childhood, the corridors of dementia and beyond. London based printmaker and illustrator Paul Catherall here explains the process of bringing the cover of this extraordinary book to life……

‘The brief for the illustration was definitely prescriptive with quite a tight deadline. We agreed it would be a good idea to do some parts separately then they could be put together digitally. The parachutist figure was cut separately and a bit larger, however it needed to be in keeping with the level of detail and form of the rest of the print.

Suzanne suggested that she could use the clouds from the front and manipulate them for the back - if I created a darker faded backdrop for them.  I love the process of linocuts from the design through to the cutting and printing, but it’s so labour intensive.

The Rising Sun element was also cut and printed separately and with a few choices of tone and strength to be overlaid by Suzanne. I printed up a handful of the front cover clouds image to allow for misprints and to use a few as test pieces. I tried printing the Rising Sun element over the clouds, and I was very happy with the result. The elements were mainly cut out of lino in separate plates and put together almost like a jigsaw, colour by colour. The background skies were from the same plates with initially the yellow printed then the faded sunset colours added in four stages. The fade is produced by gradually moving across a plate horizontally; dropping down a few millimetres at a time from top to bottom.

Registration is extremely important - you can see a piece of card on the photos where the little plates of lino sit after being inked. This is the registration card and the image is traced from the initial master line drawing (in reverse). All the elements come from the master drawing which is used to trace onto the lino pre-cutting and also for this positional guide.

All in all it was a lovely project to work on.’

Dadland is published by Chatto & Windus and is out 28th July

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