Hunchbacks

I really love how paper silhouettes and cut outs look, but I always get really fed up before I'm even half way through and end up fucking them up. Also, because I'm a lefty,(1 in 4 Apollo astronauts were left-handed!)I find it really tricky to wield the scalpel and I tend to drag it in the wrong direction, blunting the blade and making the paper look ad though I chewed through it with my teeth. But as usual, I'm cold and can't sleep so I'll just upload some pictures to illustrate my point!

These are a couple of pictures from a little book I made last year based on memory and and how untrustworthy it is. Also how misleading and confusing everything is when you're a child and how things are so exaggerated when you think back on them. Well...that's how I sold it, but really it was about all the oddballs my Dad knew and how scared me, Cat and Sue were of them. The one that stands out most was a poor man called Austin who was a hunchback, drove a white van and always brought us oranges. We were terrified the oranges might be infected (hunchback-ism being HIGHLY contagious of course)and would be too afraid to eat them. Also as we were learning the alphabet at the time , became convinced that Austin and Oscar Orange were one and the same and so we always knew him as Oscar Orange. That's how I came to call the book "The Obscure tale of Oscar Orange and the Shadow people". It should really have been called something like "Childhood ignorance"...
I wrote little poems to go with the illustrations and printed them onto tissue paper to try and keep with the whole shadowy feel...I also made the stupid mistake of not considering what paper I used beforehand and drawing the pictures straight onto quite heavy black card. It was quite a disaster and that fucking card nearly broke me! SO MANY DREADFUL MISTAKES!

I could have uploaded a nicer photo of us, but I think this one just sums up our awkwardness and confusion!