Inspiration Monday: Rooftops in Paris & London

The blog has been on hiatus from updates for a few weeks, as I was sent on a business trip to Paris and London. This was my first time ever in Europe, and it was an incredible experience.

I took many things away from the trip, including a grand sense of scale (seeing how big the Eiffel Tower and some paintings in the Louvre really are), visiting the graves of Jim Morrison and George Melies, and even taking an opportunity to do Monty Python's silly walk barefoot across Abbey Road. (I have photos to prove it)

But in terms of useful material for the book, I took note and captured some images of various rooftops that grabbed my attention. One of the illustrations that has yet to be created is for my long-form poem The Great Epic Journey of Professor Stitch-Wicket, which is planned to be a two-page spread of the professor sailing over a vast cityscape in a hot-air balloon. I've been researching Victorian rooftop images online so far to get ideas, but actually seeing real ones in Europe has given me a more personal sense of inspiration for this yet-to-be-completed drawing.

Here are some of the more interesting ones I discovered. It's highly possible some of these facades could find themselves rendered in ink sometime this Fall...

Feature in Light Magazine

Recently I was invited to have a phone conversation with Craig Ketchum of the local artist collective WeMakeStuff to talk about the book. Some of my ramblings about working on this project have been featured in this spotlight feature for The Light Magazine.

Click the image to enlarge for reading, or click here for the direct link.