Anton Chekhov

Although I'd already had a few ideas for my own projects I was interested by the brief set by Mack to illustrate/produce visual responses to some of Anton Chekhov's short stories and plays. I've never read anything by him before but I listened to a couple of the BBC radio productions. The one that really stuck with me was 'The Black Monk' which was quite a spooky story about a writer who is visited by the black monk, a spirit which ends up turning him evil, ruining his life and causes him to die. I read the story after listening to the adaptation and I loved the descriptions of the surroundings, the details about characters and the monk and I felt really inspired. I started working on some visuals yesterday, I've been using a script 'Ruddigore' as my sketchbook, it seemed appropriate as it's also got some supernatural references in it. So far I've only done a couple of pages but I'm quite pleased with them, the brief asked for black and white only so I've been trying different ways of applying black ink to the page which has been pretty fun. I want to work faster but everything takes forever to dry!