OCTAVIUS O'MALLEY Part I

OCTAVIUS O'MALLEY AND THE MYSTERY OF THE EXPLODING CHEESEwas written by Alan Sunderland.

In 2005 I was contracted by HarperCollins to illustrate three books in this series. They turned out to be some of the more enjoyable books I've worked on. HarperCollins were great to work with, and the stories were a lot of fun to illustrate. The author, designer, editor, and myself seemed to be all moving in the same direction, and were very much in sync with ideas. The basic brief I was given at the start was: "We see the illustrations for this book as being very '40s film noir, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Becall in trench coats...". The only stipulation was there was to be no smoking! The film noir and 1940s aspect greatly appealed to me.

I did a lot of research and hunting for reference material for this book. At the time I hadn't quite embraced the internet, so most of my research was done at libraries. I found a fantastic book on film noir at the State Library called The Noir Style which was full of great pictures. I loved it so much I photocopied the whole book. I also purchased Dark City, which was also handy. When I finally accessed the internet I trawled hundreds of images...

Next up, character designs...

And then there's the villains. Villains are always the most fun...

 'Kurt Remarque' was my favourite character. He was vividly described as a fat albino rat. I decided to make his tail morbidly obese also. There's something really repulsive about a rat's tail as it is, but an obese tail is even more disgusting. I'm surprised I wasn't ask to tone down his tail.

Once the characters were sorted, I did the roughs. Initially I was going to do one full page and one half page illustration for each chapter...

In the end I did a mix of illustrations of all shapes and sizes, and ended up with about 60 pictures per book. By the end of the third book I'd done close to 200 pictures! At the start I wasn't sure what medium to use for each picture. My original grand plan was to do them all like this, as finely shaded pencil drawings...

I loved how it turned out, but I knew if I went down this avenue I'd probably still be working on these! In the end I went with a looser approach, using nib and ink, and water soluble pens for the washes...

Many of these pictures were directly inspired by pictures I found when researching Film Noir...

I also went and took lots of photos of plumbing...

 Here's my favourite picture...

 And my second favourite...

I based this image on an experience I had at a pet shop. I remember crouching down to look at a really fat albino rat in a cage, nursing half a dozen young. I stuck my finger in to give the mother rat a stroke behind it's ear, and to my horror she arced and puffed up violently with an audible hiss. I even felt it's warm breath and beads of spittle hit my hand. I almost fell back into the cages behind me. It was truly terrifying!

Here's my very early concept for the cover design:

I'm a huge fan of old movie posters, and pulp covers. I was really excited to get a chance to do something in that style. Here's the layout I came up with:

I then submitted a coloured rough for approval...

I then did the finished art, which was done with acrylic inks and coloured pencils...

I didn't do anything with the text, I wanted to leave it to the designer, Darren, to come up with something cool, which of course he did...

Darren also did a fantastic job of designing the rest of the book too. Over all, I was extremely happy with the finished book — the reproduction was spot on, and it all looked very classy. I'm proud of this book.


NEXT: OCTAVIUS O'MALLEY AND THE MYSTERY OF THE MISSING MOUSE