Jim Harris Talks About Illustrating...

Rapunzel

This book is an old-fashioned telling of the Rapunzel story… so I thought the illustrations needed to be a bit old-fashioned, too.

With that in mind, I had to find some old-timey costumes to look at. (Preferably some from way back in the Middle Ages.)

When I illustrated this book, quite a few years ago, costume-research meant going to the library and lugging home twenty or thirty books about costumes, and then poring over them for a few nights. There would be books about medieval fashion; books about horses’ harnesses and carriage trappings; a few crumbly, brown-paged fairy-tale books; perhaps a book about medieval hair-do’s; books showing engravings and statues of long-ago kings and queens; and a few full-color books about movies set in the medieval era.

And I still use books like that for research. Some of the nicest ones I’ve gone ahead and bought to keep in my studio, so I won’t have to trundle off to the library so often.

But now that the internet is available, I also do some of my costume research with a few clicks of a mouse.

When I find a good costume on a historical website, I blow it up three or four times the normal size so I can see all the wrinkles and colors really well. It’s almost like looking at the costume with a magnifying glass.

Once I’ve had a good look at what real clothing from a long-ago era looked like, I can create similar clothes for my characters that look authentic. Getting the weight and texture of the fabric right… and using colors that were actually used in the given time-period… go a long way to creating a scene with a believable old-timey feel. It’s not always an easy thing to do… but I enjoy the challenge.

Also, I like to think that by looking through so many websites about so many interesting people and places, I’m getting smarter about history. Who knows, maybe it’s true!