Women Holding Strange Creatures

Drawings by Quentin Blake

By Quentin Blake

Portrait by Ben Rayner

These drawings grew from a set of pictures that I did a few years ago of children talking to strange creatures on beaches. They were a bit like illustrations to unwritten stories by E. Nesbit. Then when
I revisited them more recently I discovered that the girls had become women, either in or out of their clothes (nice for me because you don’t get much opportunity for that in children’s books, which is what I spend a lot of my time doing), and the relationships with the creatures had got more complicated. Part of the pleasure of doing these is the feel of drawing with a reed pen on watercolor paper. There aren’t any preliminary drawings, I just start off and find out as I draw what the creature is going to be like, and discover something about the strange relationship. I don’t really know beforehand. Most of the time the women seem to be in charge—whatever the significance of that is. One of my friends said she found them “hilarious and slightly alarming.” See what you think.

A P Watt Ltd on behalf of Quentin Blake