Feb 9, 2017

HAME - Annalena Mcafee

After the breakdown of her relationship, Mhairi McPhail moves with her daughter to Fascaray, a remote Scottish Island. Commissioned to write a biography on the late Bard of Fascaray Grigor McWatt; Mhairi is keen to learn more of this mysterious poet. Combining Mhairi’s words and the evocative writing of Grigor, Hame builds to become an intricate, multi-layered story of family and identity.

The Scottish landscape forms a focal part of the text, so we asked Joe Mclaren to create a scene to fittingly convey the depth and scope of the book using his typically graphic style. Here, Joe describes  his technique for creating the cover:

“I work in scraperboard, a medium much more popular in the middle of the 20th Century. It consists of a stiff sheet of hardboard, covered in a thick layer of white gesso clay and topped with a thin layer of black shellac. A scraping tool a bit like an old-fashioned dip-pen is used to scrape the black away to reveal the white.

The practice of removing the black to reveal the white is the opposite of drawing on paper - think of it as ‘negative drawing’. It’s like the difference between sculpting in marble and sculpting in clay, but in two dimensions. Every scratch reveals more light falling onto the elements in the picture, and you need to think ahead carefully as you work.

I often work smaller than the finished artwork requires, and then scan at a very high resolution to enable the image to be blown up and exaggerate the naturally texture of the linework.”

Hame is published by Harvill Secker and is and out now.

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