The Book of the Erinyes

A couple of weeks ago I did the first set of “offi­cial” pho­to­graphs with Dawn (who is mod­el­ling in the role of Tisiphone).

Des­pite some prob­lems with my cam­era (serves me right for being lazy and rely­ing on the auto-focus when I was shoot­ing in low light!) I man­aged to get some great pho­tos, which I’m slowly and painstak­ingly main­pu­lat­ing now.

I thought I’d share them:

(more on the Erinyes art­work page)

The unplanned sus­pen­sion of work on the Book of the Erinyes over the past couple of months (due in no small part to mov­ing house) has proved serendip­it­ous — I’ve been think­ing a lot about the planned art­work, and each idea is now wrapped in an abund­ance of layers.

As well as allow­ing me to revise and refine the planned images, this frus­trat­ing time spent thinking-without-doing has also greatly increased the com­plex­ity of the icon­o­graphy to a point where I’m now almost glad I’ve had this oppor­tun­ity to delay the project.

I’ve been doing a lot more back­ground read­ing — mov­ing on from the ori­ginal Greek myths of the Erinyes, and onto their appear­ance in pop­u­lar cul­ture (Neil Gaiman’s Sand­man story arc The Kindly Ones has been a par­tic­u­larly refresh­ing treatment).

Oh, and I’m still look­ing for mod­els, so if you want to play a part in this, please get in con­tact.

Two of the three mod­els I had lined up for this pro­ject have had to drop out, so if you fancy being one of the 3 Fur­ies then let me know.

The mod­el­ling will be fine art nude, but heav­ily shad­owed and tex­tured (see sample mock-up pics — but note: no body-paint will be involved!). The photo ses­sion should take no longer than 2 hours.

You don’t need to have had any pre­vi­ous mod­el­ling exper­i­ence, but you should be in the south of Eng­land (I’ll pay up to £30 trav­el­ling expenses, but the mod­el­ling work itself is unpaid) — prefer­ably in or near Brighton. You will also receive a free lim­ited edi­tion copy of the book when it’s finished.

So, if you’re inter­ested in tak­ing on the role of an aven­ging Greek god­dess then drop me an email!

I’ve just dropped a mes­sage to Nina—who did some life mod­el­ling for me a year-or-so ago—to see if she’s avail­able to model for the third of the Fur­ies.  If so then I’ll have mod­els for all three, and I’ll feel like this whole pro­ject is on safer ground!

Regard­less of that, I’ve got this com­ing week planned out:

• Monday to Wed­nes­day: fin­ish writ­ing text for the Book of the Erinyes
• Thursday (pay­day!): pay mem­ber­ship at Brighton Print­mak­ing Centre and book use of the Let­ter­press machine
• Sat­urday: buy the first batch of art paper for the pages of the book
• The week after: start com­pos­it­ing the text at the Print­mak­ing centre and start print­ing out the pages

If I can get all that done then I should have some res­ults to post on this site very soon.