Introductions!

Welcome to this bit of foolishness...

For fun, I started drawing cartoons involving the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their circle (amongst other historical figures) in my sketchbook. I then  innocently posted a couple on Facebook and they received such a nice response that I got a little carried away and made more. So it was inevitable that I gave Pre-Raphernalia its own blog... 

My name is Raine Szramski and I'm an illustrator, painter and comic book artist who works at a used bookstore for little things like health insurance and oh, a steady paycheck. I have been in love with the Pre-Raphaelite art movement for years and have spent a lot of time reading stacks of books on the lives of the people involved in and around their circle.

This naturally led to me drawing these silly (but hopefully affectionate) cartoons in my sketchbooks during my lunchbreaks. I did these purely for my own entertainment at first until friends eventually persuaded me to share. (You know who you are...) The lovely Grace Nuth of  the awesome Pre-Raphaelite-inspired blog, The Beautiful Necessity   http://thebeautifulnecessity.blogspot.com/ posted some of them and I was surprised by the response they received.  Of course, I responded to this  by getting a little over-enthusiastic and doing pages and pages more.

Getting carried away (snickering to myself the whole time while drawing them and getting funny looks from my co-workers), they eventually got their own official FB page.

The majority of the cartoons are in pencil and done in my sketchbooks. I am in the process of going back and transferring them to "good" paper and inking them.

 I talked about the cartoons in two posts in my other blog, The Watcher Tree (which deals with my other illustration artwork). http://thewatchertree.blogspot.com/2012/02/pre-raphernalia.html  and  http://thewatchertree.blogspot.com/2012/02/pre-raphernalia-part-2-revenge-of.html

Fo those who have been following the newest cartoons on Facebook and Tumblr, I wanted to add another way to read them a bit more easily and in sequence.

A friend of mine told me he knew nothing about these people but was enjoying the cartoons anyway ... so I thought it also might be fun to include some historical notes and photos for anyone also unfamiliar with the people or incidents involved.

Anyway, enough of me rattling away--

Onto the cartoons!