Entering Shadowland
Iain first wanted to be a writer, and recently combined art and literature in his debut book
Iain McCaig, best know for his work as a concept and storyboard artist, wanted to train as journalist, which he thought would lead him to pen great works of literature. After three decades as an artist, he wrote his first book, combining words and pictures in the wildly inventive Shadowland. Even though he’d written screenplays, he felt something was missing from his work.
“I felt the call of that other, long lost fork in the road, only stronger now because I had something I really wanted to say. And so I wrote Shadowline: an art book-with-a-story, as a way of taking readers to that Shadowland realm of the artist, to show them what lies beyond the paint and pencils.”
But what exactly is Shadowland? “For me, it’s a place of eternal contrasts, of breathtaking muses and hordes of undead deadlines. I Hulk-out there, becoming a monster that thinks in a whole different way from this mild-mannered Iain. It’s a place as real and familiar to me as the world I come back to, one of friends and family and interviews. I didn’t write it to be a writer, I wrote it to communicate. Which is when I finally got an inkling of what writing was all about.”