Fore-edge painting plans: Charles Dickens and Hans Christian Andersen

Project plans and thumbnail sketches for my new books

I picked up some lovely hardcover editions of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales and Charles Dickens. Best of Charles Dickens contains Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, and A Christmas Carol. (I respectfully refuse to concede ‘best of Dickens’ to any novel other than Our Mutual Friend, but it’s so large that it would crowd any other story out of the book and take up all 800 pages for itself.)

The Dickens collection could be more truthfully named ‘The Shortest of Charles Dickens’, but that’s not a title that sells.

Both books are gilded, so it’s a marvellous chance to add some vanishing fore-edge paintings. They were sold shrink-wrapped, so I held my breath as I unwrapped them, hoping the paper wouldn’t be the really glossy kind that you can’t paint on. Thankfully, the paper is the right kind, a little thin, but workable.

For the Hans Christian Andersen book, I am going to attempt a picturesque little set of scenes from some of the fairy tales. I took heavy inspiration from one of my childhood ‘art heroes’, Pauline Baynes, who illustrated Narnia.

Pauline Baynes illustration from ‘The Horse and His Boy’.

Another delightful Pauline Baynes illustration from ‘The Horse and His Boy’.

Based on these, I’ve made a thumbnail sketch for the Hans Christian Andersen fore-edge painting, which will contain miniature scenes separated by decorative vines:

Thumbnail sketch for the Hans Christian Andersen book.

For the Dickens collection, I realised that due to the size of the book, I’ll have to create a ‘split double’ painting by dividing the book at the halfway point, like this Shakespeare collection painted by the incredible Martin Frost:

Split-double fore-edge paintings on an 1863 edition of “The Works of William Shakespeare”, artist Martin Frost.

I also want to take some inspiration from Victorian decorative frames and cameo brooches, so I started sketching:

Initial sketch designs for the Dickens fore-edge painting

However, after realising that the split-double painting would give me room for eight miniature characters or scenes across both halves of the book, I had this idea of drawing two scenes from each story in the book and pairing them together like a Victorian locket. I sketched a mockup of what this would look like on a partly open book and was very pleased with the final design:

Final thumbnail design for the Dickens collection. (Ignore the strange cryptic wordings and markings, and the handwriting likely intelligible only to myself.)

Dickens is one of my favourite authors and it will be wonderful to try my hand at illustrating his characters! I hope to begin work on the fairy tale one in December first, as a special commission for a friend… so stay tuned!

xx The Inky Baroness