In the studio with Nate Sweitzer – To Kill a Mockingbird
Nate Sweitzer in his studio in Cary, North Carolina.
Illustrator Nate Sweitzer says Folio's To Kill a Mockingbird is his love letter to this classic novel.
llustrating To Kill a Mockingbird was never going to be easy. Most people have read it and seen the film – including, of course, Folio illustrator Nate Sweitzer. ‘So, to create something that felt like our own,’ he says, ‘I had to divorce my brain from the film shots, be watchful for the likenesses, but also not stray too far from societal understanding, because that would just be distracting.
‘I’m not the author or the director, I’m creating something different – a celebration of this super-iconic story. Atticus had to be Atticus, but not Gregory Peck. For six months I got to be a designer as well as an illustrator.'
In his studio, a spare bedroom in the house in North Carolina he shares with partner Sophia, Nate has a standing desk with three screens – a monitor, a laptop and an IPad showing a mood board, a ketch and his photo references. ‘Usually I take photographs of myself, but for this project I wanted to get consistent likenesses, so I held a casting at my old college in Detroit. I got volunteers including a girl around the age of nine, a boy around 11 and a man of 45. I found clothes in thrift stores – overalls, a hat, a dress. And I gathered photographs from the American South’s Depression era to ensure I could faithfully represent the book’s setting, with cultural markers like clothing and architecture.’
He stuck her sunhat on the snowman’s head
The foreman handed a piece of paper to Mr Tate who handed
it to the clerk who handed it to the judge. . . . I shut my eyes
These screens are inspiration and reminder ‘in case I get stumped’, but digital is also part of Nate’s process. ‘I sketch on a toned board, then overlay a vellum surface,’ he says. ‘When Scout, Jem and Calpurnia are in the church, for example, I had glued the vellum and happened to miss certain spots, so it introduced an irregular texture – it’s an ephemeral element of chance that you can’t recreate or predict in advance.
‘I then draw the fine lines on the vellum, a kind of plastic, so you can wipe it off and redraw really easily. Then on top I paint in acrylic and ink. At around the 90 per cent-ready stage, I scan it into the computer and use Photoshop to finish it.’ He also has prescanned textures and materials, some from his carefully organised cupboard of markers, pastels and paint. Combining these elements of traditional and digital material and processes, old and new, allowed Nate to create what he hopes is more than simply an illustrated version of the book for Folio. ‘I was trying to create an artefact for years to come,’ he says. ‘A love letter to Mockingbird.’
Miraculously on pitch, a hundred voices sang out Zeebo’s
words
'Don't you remember me, Mr Cunningham?'
