Whole Lotta Glove

In June the Forbidden Planet blog organised a riposte to an assertion made in a national newspaper that there weren't any good illustrators any more, illustrators who could actually draw stuff that looked like the stuff they were drawing. The challenge was to draw a cover for either 'Catcher in the Rye' or 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist.' 

I opted for 'Catcher' and read it through again. I was a long way down the moody-kid-in-red-check-cap road before it occurred to me that it wasn't all that imaginative a response.

In the end I picked up on the root of Holden's 'catcher' image, his brother Allie's catching mitt, which had poems written on it in green ink.

I don't know what happened to the competition, it was supposed to be whittled down to a shortlist in July, and then August and now it's December in a couple of days, so although we were asked not to publicise our own work, I'm assuming it's all got lost down the back of a drawer somewhere.

So, this is what I did.

I made it by drawing the glove and experimenting with green ink in a dip nib to get an authentically handwritten effect, then scanning in glove and writing separately and combining them in layers.