Anna Karenina

 When I was a little kid (and already obsessed with drawing), I took a lot of inspiration from the books I was reading. On lazy days, which I had a lot of because I was homeschooled and indoors-y, I had this kind of routine where I would read until some image caught my imagination and I had to draw it, and then go back to reading  until it happened again. I drew a lot of mice and medieval scenes because I was obsessed with Brian Jacques' Redwall series.

Anyways I was reading Anna Karenina about a year and a half ago, and would have similar surges of wanting to draw after reading certain scenes. It's a very visually inspiring book- and I'm obviously not the only one who feels this way: Vogue featured a stunning editorial shot by Mario Testino with Keira Knightly in Karenina-esque dresses, some of which are her film costumes.

My illustrations came first, of course- these are over a year old. I had more scenes I wanted to do, but only got these three.

The first is Anna and Kitty at the ball, obviously.

Did anyone not have a vivid mental picture of these scene, of the black dress? Obviously not me and not Mr. Testino either:

This is the scene where Anna is at her dressing room mirror and Karenin is confronting her about her scandalous philandering ways.

And here we have Vronsky (who is always escribed as having a mustache, which completely ruins it for me) in the stable checking out the horse Gladiator. I love drawing horses, provided I can have some kind of muscle/anatomy reference to guide me. I think I looked up the musculature for this picture; I don't remember but I must have. 

This whole post makes me miss my childhood and all those days when I was free to loaf about reading and drawing whenever the fancy struck.