C is for Castles #atoz2025 #booksky

Castles…The A to Z Challenge started on Monday, but you can still join if you wish! Today I’m continuing the illustration theme with a discussion of the castles in my Princelings books.

I’m Jemima Pett, author, blogger, illustrator and guinea pig wrangler. My interests are in fantasy, environment, science (inc. fiction) and thrillers, to name a few things. This is my nth AtoZ Challenge. Mostly I talk about books. This time I’m talking about something I do without much thinking about… my illustrations.

The Princelings books and the two for younger readers, Messenger Misadventures and Cavies of Flexford Common all have illustrations. Most are chapter headings. Cavies is designed for younger readers (c 7 yrs old, Key Stage 1 in UK educational parlance). That has illustrations throughout.

This month I’m picking out one or more illustrations each day to talk about. Except Sundays — we skip Sundays in the A to Z Challenge. Some will be from the books, some from other sketching projects.

Feel free to comment below!

And … the A to Z is a blog hop, so do go to other people who are doing it. You can find the links (and join in until 5 April) here

Castles come in many types

When I started writing and illustrating the Princelings books, I had not thought beyond sending them to two or three castles other than their own, Castle Marsh. Buckmore (yesterday’s post) turned up in book 1, with a mention of Powell, and a side trip to Vexstein. In book 2, Dimerie and Wash got featured, and then there was the derelict Fortune, which seemed to be haunted, and in 3, we met the ladies of Arbor, which is a mirror-image version of Buckmore. Others got mentioned in passing, or with characters coming from them. Hugo visited several new ones in book 4 as part of his role of a traveling Wozna cola salesman. Castle Sowerby is not recommended at Halloween. Powell turned out to have some interesting secret passages.

Then we went south in book 5, to the three warring castles of Deeping, Forest and White Horse. And in book 6 we discovered castles in the Rhineland, mainly the Castle Laurel-Eye. And young Victor innocently asked the not-so-secret-agent, Sundance, how he remembered the layouts of all these castles.

I follow Sundance, wondering how he always seems to know his way about the strangest of strange castles on the least acquaintance with them. We linger on the battlements, gazing at the stars reflected in the river far below, and I ask him.

“It’s a combination of homework, memory, and adherence to pattern,” he says, somewhat enigmatically. 

“What do you mean by that?”

“Some places have plans or maps of them, if you know where to look, and I do a lot of looking, especially if I know I’m going somewhere in advance. Some places I’ve been to before, so I always commit places to memory. But then, many castles have similar plans, because they have similar functions. In our country, lots of the castles and palaces look similar because they were built by the same people, so they literally are copies of each other. Even when they aren’t copies, they are similar because the same rooms have to be in the same sort of place in relation to each other. So you can guess the pattern once you get used to it.”

I think about that for a while. I can see the sense in it. 

Bravo Victor, Ch 12, (c) J M Pett

By the time Willoughby has been around the country at least twice on his travels as a narrator, and Dylan and Dougall have swept down from the Scottish Islands to help Prince Kevin recover his castle (Deeping), I thought I’d stop inventing castles. But no, the pirates had to be resettled in one (Castle Roc).

The Illustrations

Here are some of the castles. See what you can find in common.

I start by using pencil (Derwent Cassell HB or 2B) on paper. Then I use an inkpen over to create the line drawing (I have a set of three Pilot Drawing pens, nos 01, 03, and 05). After that, I usually erase the pencil. By book 9 I was doing all my illustrations on the iPad, and I could take a JPEG copy of a hand-drawn castle, and amend it, or change it about a bit, rather than start from scratch. More about that when we get to M.

All were done in the same way, except Castle Edin which was drawn onto iPad, using the real Edinburgh Castle as reference. These come from books 1 The Princelings of the East, 2. The Princelings and the Pirates, 3, The Princelings and the Lost City, 4. The Traveler in Black and White, 5. The Talent Seekers, and 8 The Princelings of the North.