EXTRACTS: llustrators issue 7 © 2014 The Book Palace (96 PAGES in Full edition)

3 In 1975 Alan Lee and his partner, the artist Marja Kruÿt , spent a weekend with friends down in Devon. As Lee recounts, “In the course of this one weekend, wandering around the moor, finding rivers and ancient woods, I realised that everything that I would ever want to draw was actually here. There was so much richness in the texture and forms of these fantastic trees… and I decided in the course of that weekend to come and live here. I looked at a couple of houses, found one, and made an offer on it, all in that one weekend!” The love of landscape was deep rooted in Lee’s psyche. He was born in Middlesex in 1947, and he recalls, “As a child, I lived on the edge of the green belt just outside London, so there were fields, and trees, and canals, and rivers. It was quite an interesting area, but it was also a landscape that had the detritus of the town and factories spilling over into it: there were Alan Lee Peter Richardson enters the enchanted kingdom of the world’s premier illustrator of folklore, fantasy, and dark legend… Alan Lee’s darkly magisterial watercolours conjure up worlds steeped in myth and romance, underpinned with a sense of brooding unease. FACING PAGE: A scene from ‘The Lord of the Rings’ published by Allen and Unwin in 2002. ABOVE: Cover art for Mervyn Peake’s ‘Gormenghast’ trilogy, Penguin books 1983. ABOVE RIGHT: An illustration from ‘The Mabinogion’, published by Dragon’s Dream in 1982.