Final Witches cover

The final version of this (promise) - with words and letters and everything. In the strange and frightening alternate universe in which this version of the book was published someone gave me the chance to illustrate it apparently.

More Dahl Daubings

My grandmother was tremendously old and wrinkled, with a massive wide body which was smothered in grey lace [...] My grandmother was the only grandmother I ever met who smoked cigars.
Roald Dahl, The Witches

"Birgit Svenson [...] One day she started growing feathers all over her body. Within a month, she had turned into a large white chicken. Her parents kept her for years in a pen in the garden. She even laid eggs."
Roald Dahl, The Witches

"...down in the kitchen the cook once found a baby crocodile swimming in his saucepan of soup."
Roald Dahl, The Witches



More Witches based scribbling. I'd intended to do some illustrations for the back of the mock book cover. I wanted three portraits in circular windows, along the lines of what you used to get on EC comics covers, a sort of preview of what lay within... 'terrifying transformations'... 'revolting recipes'... 'Ghoul-hunting Grannies'. It turned out they looked quite cramped on the back of the cover, but here they are anyway sans their EC style portholes.

The Witches

And here (barring the temptation to tweak some more) is the finished illustration. Below is how we got here. Had to abandon the weird Village of the Damned eye effect as I couldn't work out if it was obscuring too much of the face/mask - maybe I should have been braver and stuck to my original idea. Ended up painting in some more obvious lightning bolt type things anyway, which I think work ok and which luckily I enjoy painting.