BrianaDrawsBooks

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.