The beginning of the story reads: “Whether Armilla is like this because it is unfinished or because it has been demolished, whether the cause is some enchantment or only a whim I do not know. The fact remains that it has no walls, no ceiling, no floors. It has nothing that makes it seem a city except the water pipes rising vertically where the houses should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be. A forest of pipes that end in taps, showers, spouts and overflows. Against the sky, a lavabo’s white stands out or a bathtub or some other porcelain, like late fruits still hanging from the boughs. You would think that the plumbers had finished their job and gone away before the bricklayers arrived; or else their hydraulic system indestructible, had survived a catastrophe, an earthquake or the corrosion of termites.”

With the pipe theme central to the story, I decided to articulate the storyline around a main pipe running across all the pages (the one in the middle of the page.) The illustrations themselves have been produced using a mixed-media technique: the characters were hand drawn with water-based inks and acrylics; the backgrounds were also painted in the same way but as separate pieces. All the elements were then scanned, retouched in Photoshop, and printed out to apply another layer of ink/acrylic where need be. This process was repeated until the final result was reached. The copy was then hand written using a quill pen and Indian ink. The different pieces of text were then also scanned, color reversed and set in place.

⁠—CLIENT⁠—

Self.

⁠—CREDITS⁠—

Julien Butterlin

⁠—ROLE—

Illustration