brianadrawsbooks - Tumblr blog

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I've always been a big Poe fan and a big T. Kingfisher fan, so I was thrilled to find out she's written her own take on The Fall of the House of Usher.

This spooky little book has all the gothic Victorian vibes of the original along with some new sci-fi concepts and a non-binary protagonist. While I loved seeing things from Alex's viewpoint, Maddy was the character who I really wanted to paint. She's a little bit crazy, a little bit dead, and absolutely fantastic.

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Usually, I only paint an illustration from a book if I loved the book. However, this was inspired by The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell, which I actually was pretty frustrated by. It's a great concept and has stunning prose, but the plot ended up not really working for me. A rich, privileged person surviving by sacrificing their servant just isn't a triumphant ending I can cheer for...

But anyways, there were some intense, gorgeously written scenes in this book that just demanded to be painted. So this piece is based on Lucrezia's river god dream sequence, and I had so much fun working on it. It's partly inspired by Botticelli and the other Renaissance artists mentioned in the book and very heavily inspired by my fascination with art nouveau hair.

Also, I just want to give a shout-out to my very supportive, patient partner who doesn't question it when I say, "babe, I need help with a pose for a painting, can you come pretend to be a possessive, passionate river god who is both ambiguous and a little threatening?"

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Blackthorn and Grim, from Juliet Marillier's Blackthorn and Grim series. This trilogy about two damaged people slowly healing from trauma completely captured my heart. They're two convicts on the run who work together to build a new life and overcome the past that haunts them. I loved Blackthorn's intensity and energy, and it paired perfectly with Grim's stability and strength. And as a huge fan of slice-of-life stories, the plots about a healer chilling in the forest, helping others and occasionally solving mysteries really appealed to me.

Since I loved this series so much, it was hard to figure out an illustration. Originally, I wanted something very realistic, showing the pair at work, possibly with Blackthorn mixing potions and Grim gardening. However, once I started sketching, I realized I really wanted to focus on their faces and their connection. So this one ended up a little more abstract, but I hope it captures Blackthorn's focus, Grim's sweetness, and the incredible way these two support and rely on each other.

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I hope you'll draw even more art of fat people! That one drawing of yours of a fat selkie is so nice and drawn in a way that feels like it really respects fat bodies

I definitely will be! I love drawing fat people because their curves reflect light and shadow in so many beautiful ways.

P.s. I forget to update my Tumblr account a lot, but if you go to my Instagram, which is also @brianadrawsbooks, I've done some other similar pieces in the past

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Faithful, from Tamora Pierce's Song of the Lioness quartet. Though he looks like a cat, he's actually a constellation that occasionally deigns to help out The Mother Goddess.

I first read this series when I was around 8, and decades later, Faithful remains my favourite fantasy animal companion. What's better than a magical cat who talks to you and can never die?

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A nice spooky, magical, deadly garden, inspired by Alice Hoffman's Practical Magic. This post is the beginning of an October art challenge I'm participating in over on Instagram, but it's also just a fun opportunity to paint a scene from an old favourite.

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So over the past month, I've been slowly reading Tanith Lee's Flat Earth series (no relation to the conspiracy theory). It's this crazy elaborate collection of stories about anthropomorphic personifications doing weird things in a vaguely bronze age setting.

The stories are super bizarre, and you have to have a very high tolerance for strangeness and horror, but they're written so beautifully that I'm in love. It's seriously hard to pick a single scene to paint because everything Lee writes about is so gorgeous.

For this illustration, I chose to paint the dark queen of Sheve. Partially because I liked that she's one of the only kind, reasonable people in a sea of chaos, and partially because I'm a sucker for elaborate hairstyles. All Lee's descriptions of smoke-like hair ornamented with moons and stars got me in the mood to paint.

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Reading The Brides of Rollrock Island by Margo Lanagan got me in the mood to paint a selkie, but I ended up going in a bit of a different direction than the book did.

This book is about a sea witch who starts selling selkie brides as part of a complex revenge plot on a town. I appreciated that the book acknowledged just how creepy it is for a dude to be trapping a magical creature and forcing her to be his wife, but ultimately felt like the author sexualized all the selkies without giving them any agency.

So the selkie I painted is a bit different. Not only is she curvier (seals are so round, why are authors always describing selkies as skinny?), but she won't be letting anyone steal her sealskin and trap her on land.

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In-yo from Nghi Vo's The Empress of Salt and Fortune. She was an especially fun character to draw because she has so much stubbornness and confidence, and I added a rabbit to reference her relationship with her handmaiden, whose nickname is Rabbit.

Altogether, this little novella was absolutely packed with interesting characters and fascinating backdrops. I loved the way the author wove multiple Asian cultures into an interesting fantasy world, and she did a great job of showing all the different ways women can be strong.

I'm still saving the second book in the series for a time when I need a bit of a pick-me-up.

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A little doodle of Zoe from The House in the Cerulean Sea. This book was so adorable I wanted to draw just about every scene, and I still have a couple ideas I might come back to lately.

Klune does a great job of writing cozy fantasy, where tired, downtrodden characters find their family and solve their problems with good intentions, practicality, and kindness. I also appreciate just how much diversity and queerness he adds to his books. In the modern fantasy scene, it's actually a bit rare to have gay men writing about gay men, so it's nice to encounter that perspective.

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A Hreinn girl from Cat Valente's Fairyland series. Hreinn girls are humanoid reindeers who can shift into full reindeers. They live in a forest of glass and typically focused on farming, reading, and cooking in their underground burrows. Much like selkies, they're often harassed by hunters looking to steal one as a wife. Though they only have a small part in a single Fairyland book, I've always been intrigued by them.

Fairyland is one of my all-time favorite series, so I've done quite a bit of Valente fanart over the years. If you love gorgeous prose, intriguing characters, heartbreaking plots, and fascinating world building, this is the series for you.

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The Hobbit movie might've been rough, but I'll be forever grateful that it gave us Lee Pace as Thranduil.

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