My Sister's Tiny Hands

Here's yet another song illustration! I promise I do draw other things from time to time. And this time it's not one drawing, but seven!

I had been listening to the Handsome Family a lot lately, and found the imagery in the song 'My Sister's Tiny Hands' very inspiring. The lyrics tell a very clear story, so I decided to tell that in a series of illustrations!

We came in this world together
Legs wrapped around each other
My cheek against my sister's
We were born like tangled vine

We lived along the river
Where the black clouds never lingered
The sunlight spread like honey
Through my sister's tiny hands

But while picking sour apples
In the wild waving grasses
Sister stumbled in the briar
And was bitten by a snake

Every creature casts a shadow
Under the sun's golden fingers
But when the sun sinks past the waving grass
Some shadows are dragged along

Alone, I took to drinking
Bottles of cheap whiskey
And staggering through the back woods
Killing snakes with a sharpened stick

But still I heard her laughing
In those wild waving grasses
Still her tiny hands went splashing
At the river's sparkling shore

So I took my rusty gas can
And an old iron shovel
I set the woods to burning
And choked the river up with stones

This is something I've been working on from time to time since our trip to Mexico (!!). I spent ages sketching, made four drawings in one day, waited for a few weeks, made two more and finally finished the last one last night. These are a bit more complex than the other song illustrations I posted. Every piece is still hand cut, but the different layers of colour were glued to separate pages and put together in Photoshop. This gives the effect of layers of colour instead of pieces of paper glued on top of each other! I also desaturated some of the colours to get a more muted effect.


I'm going to see this band live tomorrow night and I'm really excited about that! Here's the song if you want to give it a listen: