THE CARDIFF GIANT RISES AGAIN!

It can be a startling thing to unearth old art and find that it still stands up to some degree of scrutiny.  I recently found the original illustrations to a book I drew a bit over 40 years ago.  It was my first full-length book, and I really put a lot into it.  All of my life and career, I have been fascinated by line, and the vast majority of my professional output has been drawn in ink on paper, often colored later, first with watercolor wash and later digitally when I learned how to do that.  For whatever reasons, I produced this book in mixed media using acrylic paint combined with various pencils and tightened up with my trusty Rapidograph pen.  More on the technique later.  I'm starting out with six pieces that I particularly enjoy for various reasons.

But first, some back story on the book:  It was titled simply "The Cardiff Giant."  It's a true account of one of the great hoaxes in American history.  It all took place back in 1869.  A man named George Hull concocted an elaborate money-making scheme in which he hired some men to dig up what seemed to be a petrified giant buried on his relative,  William Newell's property.  Science took a back seat to fantasy here since flesh, human or otherwise, does not turn to stone under any circumstances, but there were innumerable credulous people willing to believe that this was the remains a giant human.  The truth, of course, was entirely different.  The stone giant was a sculpture carved by other men hired by Newell which was buried on his farm to be later dug up seemingly by accident by men digging a well.  The first image I'm posting is of the workers digging in hard earth unknowingly about to discover something quite other than water.

The second illustration is of a couple of scientists examining the giant to determine authenticity.  This gave me the irresistible opportunity to render my own version of the classic "eye enlarged by the magnifying glass" image, so beloved by fans of detective fiction.
 

 

The third image is one of my favorites, as several characters reading the news are known to me.  The lady reading over the shoulder of the dapper gent is based on my lovely wife.  The gent is me, as I looked back in the early 1980s, and the little girl is our daughter.  To the right, the bearded chap is my friend Dave LeBlanc, who has been seen here on my blog making various cameo appearances.  He has often appeared in my illustrations over the decades.

The next scene depicts a crowd that gathered quickly after news of the "discovery" spread.  My favorite part of this bird's-eye view is the crying child, obviously unnerved by this spectacle.  Kids crack me up.

In this scene, Newell is joined by investor and co-conspirator George Hull, as the giant is exhumed while a photographer and reported observe.

There were two factions who disagreed vehemently on the supposed authenticity of the "petrified giant."  Scientist decried the possibility of a man turned to stone.  Those more willing to believe the hype were happy to do so.  There were other theories of the giant's origin.  Some thought he was carved by ancient peoples.  This scene is an imagining of that.  And here, I'd like to point out a couple of creative aspects of my approach to the book.  From the beginning, I wanted to employ lots of texture and bold brush strokes in the application of the paint, particularly in the backgrounds.  I also set a task for myself wherein I would attempt to master the rendering of clouds.  That was just something that interested me at the time.  The sky here is one of my earlier in the book attempts.

The Cardiff Giant was published in 1983 by JEM Books (Julian E. Messner), a division of Simon & Schuster.  It's pretty long out of print but a search for ISBN #: 0-671-43851-4 may occasionally turn something up.

Click on the thumbnail images to view the large illustrations, and stay tuned for the next batch!