Jul 28 2009
Quantifying an epic
As I finally wrap up this monster of a book, I’m struck by the quantities of materials consumed in the process of making it, including physical stuff like pencils and tape, and also the numerous audio books I listened to while drawing & painting in the studio for 9+ months. For the interested, here’s a (fairly comprehensive) list what I consumed in the course of creating the art for The Odyssey:
40 Cretacolor Nero pencils (#3 medium – make a blacker line than graphite)
5 Plastic erasers
4 rolls artists’ tape
4 75-sheet pads of 12×16″ Fabriano 90lb. cold-press watercolor paper (each pad is about 1″ thick)
Upwards of 120 bags of chips (corn, potato, pita, root veggie, etc.)
3+ reams of printer paper
At least 22 inkjet cartridges and 1 laserjet cartridge
.
The following audiobooks, listed by author (good unless otherwise stated):
Louisa May Alcott – Little Women
Anonymous – Gawain and the Green Knight
Bill Bryson – A Short History of Nearly Everything
Cervantes – Don Quixote (switch to an abridged version after seeing how funny but long-winded it is {which makes it good fodder for adaptation})
Eoin Colfer – Airman (didn’t like)
Daniel Coyle – The Talent Code (simplistic premise, but some very valuable insights about learning and teaching)
Joseph Delaney – The Last Apprentice
Corey Doctorow – Little Brother
Arther Conan Doyle, Sir – The entire Sherlock Holmes oeuvre, for the umpteenth time.
Kathleen Duey – Skin Hunger (lamest “ending” ever)
F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby
John Flanagan – The Ranger’s Apprentic, books 1-4 (fun but highly predictable)
Jostein Gardner – Sophie’s World
Hermann Hesse – Siddhartha
Laura Hillenbrand – Seabiscuit (fabulous)
Harper Lee – To Kill a Mockingbird (excellent, of course)
– The White Darkness (excellent)
Frank McCourt – Angela’s Ashes (great, depressing), ‘Tis
LA Meyer – Bloody Jack, books 1-4 (great reader, gets better as it goes)
Kenneth Oppel – Airborn
Ovid – The Metamorphoses
Alan Paton – Cry the Beloved Country
Sylvia Plath – The Bell Jar (enjoyed way more than expected)
Terry Pratchett – Nation (awesome!), Wee Free Men
JK Rowling – The entire Harry Potter series (great on audio)
Louis Sachar – Holes
Mary Shelly – Frankenstein
Jill Bolte Taylor – My Stroke of Insight (recommended, but not on audio, as the author is a terrible reader)
Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
John Updike – Rabbit, Run (didn’t like)
Virgil – The Aeneid (didn’t like)
Kurt Vonnegut – Slaughterhouse Five (great), Breakfast of Champions, The Sirens of Titan, Cat’s Cradle (awesomely weird)
Jeanette Wall – The Glass Castle (great)
Was your version of The Bell Jar read by Maggie Gyllenhaal. Cause that is an excellent performance but unfortunately, the character will always look like Maggie whenever I think of it.
I didn’t know you were a fellow audiobook fan too. I’ve got some 4000+ in mp3 if you’re ever looking for additional material.
Yes, it was the excellent Maggie Gyllenhal reading, and I guess I don’t associate her voice and face as strongly as you do because I don’t picture her when listening to or recalling the book.
I can’t listen to anything distracting during the writing or layout process, but when I’m doing the final art, the verbal part of my brain is completely idling, so I like to use the time to catch up on my reading via audiobooks. So yes, I will definitely hit you up for some good ones when I get to that stage on my next book (which may be a while, what with the wedding and all).
BTW, I hung out with Kristin Cashore the other day at Simmons Institute (which probably calls for its own post). And told her about Otherworld.
Yay Seabiscuit!! Read it when I was a kid. I think there are Aeneid people and Odyssey people; I am in the second class as well.
Thought about the writing/final art dichotomy. Interestingly, that’s about my breakdown re distraction, and I’ve always been a little puzzled about that first composition stage, because it would seem that it would be in a different part of the brain. (I can write or draw in public, though. Beats me.) May poll artist friends now . . .
(Impressive list of materials. Something to muse over.)
[…] up what audiobooks I listened to for the 14 months I was working on Romeo & Juliet (previously: what I was listening to while drawing The Odyssey). Here they are, in no particular […]