Illustrations for Zander’s Tale

 By Dennis Lantz

Even when I started writing Zander’s Tale, I wanted there to be illustrations. But I wasn’t sure how to make it happen. My artistic talents were never sufficient for such an endeavor and have only declined in recent years.

Publishers of some classic tales used ink drawings to give the stories a little more depth. I remember reading Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson and many others and staring at the illustrations with just as much interest as the words of the story.

Because I couldn’t do the drawings, the only option was to find someone who could. I knew the right person, but I was hesitant to ask.

Amy Evans has been a friend since high school. She is a gifted artist and portrait painter and I did not doubt that she could give my story that same visual energy I remembered from the classics.  But I was reluctant to ask her for three reasons. First, I wanted a lot of images. Then, by the time I figured out what scenes I wished to include, the deadline was quickly approaching. And finally, Amy had told me in the past that she wasn’t comfortable drawing animals… and every illustration in Zander’s Tale would features animals.

But I decided to mention the idea to her anyway… and she quickly agreed to try. She’s that type of friend. But I don’t think she knew what she was being asked to do. When I explained the scope of the project, she grew a bit concerned. Maybe I imagined it. But happily, she didn’t change her mind.

Amy can sketch people, objects or landscapes with apparent ease (I say apparent because that is how it seems.) She also has notebooks full of watercolor ‘doodles’ that are quite amazing. That is her term for them, not mine. She is part of our wine making group and our bottle labels feature her ‘doodles.’  

I think I gave her a list of fifteen possible illustrations. I realized that I was asking a lot. Luckily she didn’t tell me to go scratch. Instead she asked me which images were priorities. I wanted them all, but crossed some from the list.

Time was a bigger factor than talent. The deadline was near and I hadn’t left her a lot of time to prepare or work on the project. I pondered delaying the illustrations and using them in a future special edition. But as soon as I saw the first one, I knew that I didn’t want to wait.

I drew sketches of my ideas in an attempt to show her what I wanted. They were horrible.

I printed some images from online to show body positions or facial features. It wasn’t easy finding what I wanted. Not many chimpanzees holding scepters. These were only a little more helpful than my sketches. Later she told me that she studied thousands of other images as she worked. She is far more thorough than I am.

And she frequently asked me questions…  All of this occurred during the first months of the suggested covid-19 social distancing so we communicated mostly through technology. Her inquiries amused me. Not because they weren’t pertinent, but because they were about things I had never contemplated. I didn’t believe they were critical to the story… but were significantly important to the illustrations.

What was Zander thinking when he looked at the scepter? Was Benedetto wearing clothes? How big is Zander compared to the Death Shadow? Does Clarissa wear clothes? (Questions about clothing were frequent and I had to go through the story to see if anything was mentioned.) What was Bleda thinking when he broke the… oops, you’ll have to wait for that. Could Bleda stand on his rear legs? Did I know that there are no images of that type of primate standing? Maybe they can’t. Well, in my world they can… but that didn’t make it easy for her.

Luckily we received a week extension because of the burgeoning pandemic. That time helped a lot. She ended up completing eleven interior images. When Zander’s Tale becomes an international bestseller, I’ll hire her to do eleven more.  I say that only half-jokingly.  

Obviously she had never done such a project before. To say that she went out of her comfort zone to help would be an understatement. She wasn’t always happy with the results. I had to assure her that a few of them were just what I wanted. But she knows her art better than I do. She re-did a couple images that looked great to me. The new ones were always better.

 Frequently she told me that she was unhappy about a particular image, but after a few days they seemed better. Even to her.

All I know is that over the course of those few weeks some magic happened. The story began to unfold in a different way. When I wrote it, I had only vague images in my mind. The scenery and the plot were very clear to me, but the characters were not as visually defined. Now they became so.

In the book I do not call the animals by their popular designations. There is not mention of chimpanzee, orangutan, monkey or baboon… they are short-hairs, paunch bellies, tail swingers and muzzlechins. Not wanting to confuse her, I did not refer to them in this manner during our communication.

Her artwork, both on the cover and the illustrations, makes my story better. Let me know what you think.  

The release of Zander’s Tale and my other two novels (The Spiders of Eden and Pine Street and the Mighty Mutation Circus) is less than three weeks away. For updates follow Dennis Lantz Books on Face Book.

Until next time,

Read, Learn, Live