Pairs with:

Statement from the Artist:

Twenty years is long enough to become a different artist entirely, and that is exactly what happened to me between the ink drawing I made for “Grimm's Grimmest” in 1997 and the ink drawing that anchors my recent book, “Bright Dreams: The Brilliant Inventions of Nikola Tesla”.

The Grimm's illustration, drawn for "The Girl Without Hands," was one of the first pieces I put into print. It was pure ink, unforgiving and immediate, and it suited the story's darkness. One reviewer later described the book's illustrations as adding a macabre touch to the tales, which is about the highest compliment a young illustrator drawing severed limbs and forest horrors could hope for. After that book, and “Wuthering Heights”, I set ink aside almost entirely. For more than twenty books that followed, watercolor or pencil became my language: softer, warmer, better suited to the stories that filled my career in between.

So it surprised even me when “Bright Dreams” pulled me back to ink. Tesla's story lives in a specific era of gaslight, and something about that world resisted watercolor's gentleness. I found myself reaching for the same tool I had used as a young illustrator, creating individual ink drawings and then layering and collaging the pieces together in Photoshop. The medium is the same as it was in 1997. The method of building an image from it fairly new.

What changed in twenty years wasn’t my ink drawings but the incredible leap in technology, now able to dance successfully with a crow quill pen as the pen once danced alone.”