TALE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON FOR ARC AUGUST

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Here's my review and artwork for August's Artful Readers Club.  I wanted to read 'The Curious Tale of Benjamin Button' by F Scott Fitzgerald because we have the DVD and I always like to compare a movie with the original story.  Have you read 'Chocolat' by Joanne Harris and seen the movie with the lovely Johnny Depp?  Then you will know how different a film can be from the original book.

The only thing the film of 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button' has in common with Fitzgerald's story is the title and the concept of someone being born old, living backwards and dying as a newly-born baby.  I felt Fitzgerald cheated a little here because Benjamin should have lived another nine months in the womb going backwards until he was a mere speck in the process of his creation.   It is a case of the film being so different that Fitzgerald ought to be given the opportunity to write the book of the movie if he were still alive.

And the film was better!

My version of Benjamin Button.  I think I would have enjoyed a book about these fellas instead.

Although I realised that this was only one story in a book of short stories, I expected it to take up a good proportion of the book, so it was rather a disappointment to find how quickly it ended.  When I was quite young I read a couple of Fitzgerald books and never took to his writing, and I have to say that his style doesn't appeal to me enough to read any more of his books.  In fact I'm not even tempted to read the other short stories in this book.

There's not a lot I can say about the story.  Benjy is born very old, which he objects to.  The story rambles through his life backwards in what I found was a rather pedestrian and uninspiring manner.  Sorry all you Fitzgerald fans.

ARTWORK

I was stumped to come up with an idea for the artwork, which is always the case if I haven't enjoyed or been inspired by a book.  Then I remembered reading a sentence that said various newspapers of the day ridiculed Benjamin by drawing him with the body of a fish, the body of a snake, or with horns.  That gave me a start.

This is the final piece of artwork.   

You will notice that the central figure has a tail and pitchfork as well as horns.  I thought just giving him the horns was a bit wimpish, so I gave him a bit more of a devilish appearance.

This is how I created and put the whole thing together:

I started by drawing the three figures with a Pitt Artist's pen, and painted them with Inktense pencils and a little water.

For the background I worked through various ideas in my mind, but decided in the end to cut up pieces of newspaper and glue them randomly on a sheet of paper, to represent the newspapers that were always commenting on his strange life.  I gave the newspaper background a sepia tone on Photoshop and reversed it just in case it was possible to read some of the modern text.

Then I needed a clock to indicate the reversal of the passage of time, though it is still the right way round in the picture above.  I forgot to keep the original picture before starting to alter it and had already faded it out a little and added some white lines across the clock rim.  I think the image came from a shop catalogue but I can't remember which.

I flipped the clock to indicate the reversal of time. Then I merged the three images together on Photoshop.  It took a little messing about because they were all different sizes, but I managed it in the end.  I finished off by adding the name of the book by copying the title text from the book cover.

I didn't have any faith in the whole image right from the beginning and found it hard to persevere.  It was only the absolute lack of any other idea that made me soldier on.  And you know what?  I was really happy with it in the end.

It only 'shows to go', as we often say.