Jesse Michael Renaud, known around here as `frail, was once deviantART's senior gallery director for traditional art, and he has been putting his artistic talents to good use. His striking work graced the covers of the premier issue of Mimesis, and his first graphic novel, The Book of One, will be released on 7/7/07. Here he tells us a bit about himself, his art, and his new book.


_{From The Book of One and The Aidenus}

Who is Jesse Michael Renaud?

I am a married, twenty-eight year old artist with two little girls. I am the small town guy that never quite managed to fit in. Completely incompatible with the "in" crowd as a kid, but not much of a rebel, either. I still don't have a problem colouring inside the lines. I spend four out of seven nights each week engineering the return of the sun to its place in the morning sky. In my down-time during those nights I perform menial computer related tasks in exchange for money.

In real life I am nearly invisible to the naked eye. I enjoy my anonymity in crowds. I tend to do things in multiples of three. I play video games and read high fantasy. I lust after the sweeping epic: from panoramic landscape concept art to blockbuster motion picture trilogies. I never do anything without a reason. I feel like the world's sense of awe and wonder has been slowly dying over the course of my lifetime; it seems that irreverence and cynicism have risen to take its place.

I listen to a lot of music, ranging from post-rock to grunge to morning trance to death metal to select film scores. I enjoy carefully-arranged playlists and will obsessively repeat songs. At every job I've held, without fail, I draw sketches or take notes on imaginary worlds whenever no one is looking. On a directly related note, several of those sketches have just made it into a book.


Can you tell us about the premise of The Book of One?

The story traces itself back to a string of memories from around the time I left home to discover the world, "a scrap-paper chronicle of a boy's journey to reconcile his sharp-edged reality with the unspoiled world of his imagination." It was written somewhat to the tune of Where The Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, or Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery; there may also be elements from Harold and the Purple Crayon and Where The Sidewalk Ends. But it's also set to a soundtrack of pervasive loneliness, gamma radiation, air raid sirens, and scorching post-apocalyptic winds.


Your book, with its minimalist drawings and captions on what looks like torn paper, is very different than many people's vision of a graphic novel. How did the appearance of this book come about? Is this your usual style, or did the story and this look evolve simultaneously?

The story was penned four or five years after the inspiration for it took place. I work overnight in the computer room at a distribution center, relatively isolated and surrounded by networking equipment and scraps of computer paper. Really, one thing just led to another.

Each chapter was originally a little booklet of illustrations crudely stapled together. Text captions I'd written were torn out and taped beneath the pictures, adding a bit of depth. In later chapters the effect was used occasionally to enhance the illustrations; there were instances where I found it appropriate to have an element almost appear to be removed from the scene by a slight degree of separation.

I took the staples out later to scan in the individual pages. While most of the images were edited significantly for their final digital form, I couldn't bring myself to remove all of the imperfections. The staple holes remain. The black background came from leaving the hood off of my scanner, which made it easier to digitally "treat" the paper. In book form, the final product is as intended: what seems to be the remaining pages once torn from a boy's journal and scattered by the wind.


_{Prints from The Book of One}

What are your plans for promoting The Book of One?

Mostly grass roots promotion—my own efforts and the help of my friends. This project is very dependent on word of mouth. I will be asking anyone with a copy to show it around, and anyone with a genuine interest to spread the word, link to the book's webpage, bring it up in IM conversations, and anything else we can think of.


Can you tell us about your publisher, WorldForge Press?

WorldForge Press was founded by *soma and myself to print and publish fantasy, science fiction, horror, and speculative fiction authors and artists. We really believe that the best fiction is something that needs to be felt in order to be understood: haunting and visceral, like a dream that refuses to leave upon waking.

The Book of One is WorldForge's flagship publication, with at least two more scheduled to follow by early 2008.


From your gallery, it appears you work with many artistic mediums. Can you give us an overview of the types of art you do?

My work has always splashed around in the uncharted waters between digital and traditional mediums, a sort of hybrid effort meant to employ the advantages of each. Translating the scrap paper illustrations to a digital format created a set of iconic elements that remain evident in my recent work. My other hybrid art tends to be more colourful, and usually involves taking a pencil-drawn object, fleshing it out, and placing it in a more three dimensional and heavily-atmospheric setting. I have done a number of collaborations in that vein with *soma which can be seen in our respective galleries.

While almost all of the traditional work I do suffers some amount of postproduction on the computer, I have used a number of different mediums. As a self-described world builder, I am compelled to create, so usually this finds me employing whatever I can get my hands on. Materials include: mechanical pencils, copy paper, Paint Shop Pro, digital text, oil paints, old books, a graphics tablet, computer paper, newspaper, gel ink, my blood, Super Sculpey, a digital still camera, the clone tool, Play-Doh, photoset mosaics, wood, Microsoft Paint, small animal skulls, permanent marker, the human body as a canvas, and moist beach sand.


_{A digital painting, a collaboration with *soma, a traditional drawing}

Do you find that one form of art comes easier to you than others? Or is one more difficult?

I default to pencil on copy paper, or pen on scrap paper. I use the clone tool in Paint Shop Pro as a peculiar sort of paintbrush, along with the push tool, both of which seem to function differently there than in Photoshop. These make up the bulk of the texture and atmosphere in my hybrid and digital work. Sculpting, which I don't do enough of, comes easily to me.

I would consider oil painting to be the most difficult medium of everything I've tried, though it tends to be among the most rewarding.


Is your forthcoming second graphic novel, The Aidenus, a sequel or a separate work?

It borrows several visual cues from The Book of One, as their origins are similar, but The Aidenus will be presented in a different format, and tells a different story.


You sound like a busy man. Is there anything else you're working on?

Generally speaking, if I currently have a pulse, then I am probably working on something. More or less everything I do is rooted in the make-believe cosmological model known as MAR/XOR. The immense palette provides me with unlimited storytelling capacity, while giving me a network of common threads; anything I come up with can be placed somewhere in relation to something else.

More specifically, as The Aidenus is a retelling of the extemporal First War of Heaven, most of my creative bandwidth this summer has been directed towards what will be continuations or further explorations of that tale.



Jesse Michael Renaud's Website