Devastated, Mira retreated to her late grandmother’s cottage in the rain-soaked hills of Vermont. Gran had been a children’s book illustrator in the 70s, a woman who drew goblins with button noses and wolves with sad, grandfatherly eyes. The cottage was a mausoleum of style: dusty sketchbooks, jars of brittle nibs, and a single, framed rule stitched in cross-stitch on the wall:
She packed her charcoal. The truth was good. But the lie, she now knew, was divine. fundamentals of stylized character art 23
Mira looked at her wall. At the troll with the question-mark spine. At the exhausted fairy. At the desperate, knife-sharp villain with the begging hands. jars of brittle nibs
The line that lies.