Into the Tunnel
Earlier this year, I was invited to collaborate and illustrate a dragon story. This story was created by eleven year old Nancy in Switzerland, with her grandfather John in Ballan. The story was written line-by-line via email exchanges between Europe and Australia.
Into the Tunnel follows on from Nancy and John’s first book “Where is the Mum?”
From the beginning, Nancy had very clear ideas for her story line, but she gave me free rein to bring her characters to life. The experience was both challenging and joyful, and I discovered skills I never know I’d possessed.
In Into the Tunnel, we again find the three adventurous girls, Izzy, Jane and Anna, teleported into another realm. This time, they are searching for seven missing baby dragons whose mother desperately wants to reunite her twenty-one children. Along the way, the girls call on their hidden powers as they encounter unusual challenges and strange creatures.
In 2020 when I was studying Visual Arts at Federation University, Ballarat, one of our assignments was to create a narrative concertina book based upon our outside life during the Covid lockdown. For this work I chose to illustrate scenes from our many bushwalking expeditions. On one such trip, I took a photo of John walking through a short mining tunnel near Blackwood in country Victoria. The drawing from this photo became, fortuitously, the cover page of Into the Tunnel.
The other drawings were based upon extensive online research of potential images. My most challenging task was to learn to draw dragons, both grown-ups and babies! I initially developed sketches in a visual diary journal. Then, when I was satisfied with the general layout, I created the pictures using coloured pencils, pastel pencils and in some instances watercolour pencils on textured paper.
Order your copy of Into the Tunnel from this link.
Concetta McFall
Pasta Presto
In 2016 during my first undergraduate year in Visual Art at Federation University Ballarat, I was thrown into the deep end. Creating a video was my major second semester assignment.
What the hell? What story could I tell? Anxious days followed before I spoke to my wonderful Digital Art tutor, Peter Gaulke. His advice was simple. Do something that I care about.
My brain shifted into gear. Food. No frills. No dialogue. Comedic. Music soundtrack. Armed with an iPad, my kind friend John served as cameraman to put me in the frame.
Pasta Presto was born
The Earth Goddess
