I've visualized Jeannie since my teens, daydreaming western stories about her before going to sleep because there were no decent female role models in westerns back then, let alone fastest guns, and I found her and her story incredibly exciting! Time passed and I imagined what she looked like and what her persona is. I had to work on her image in order to create illustrations of her the way I imagined her. I'm an artist so had little choice but to create illustrations!
The initial images were pretty rough, but as the story developed, so did my skill as an artist, so later images grew more refined (even if she didn't!) and I was able to use one of them as a basis for my Go West, Girl! cover.
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This is one of my first images of Jeannie, back in my teens, using a photo for reference. |
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The Evolution of My Drawings
I've worked hard on her image and personality over the years, to get her the way I visualised her. I eventually settled for tomboy beauty, but I was terrified of revealing her. I finally showed her to hubby while I hid my head under a pillow! He informed me that she was sexy, so I loved him even more for that. It was hard to reveal her to anyone. I was scared people would say - 'She's weird. Why would you want to invent her?' When she did eventually 'come out' on social media, and the response was so positive and amazing, my relief was cataclysmic. You can't imagine.
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JEANNIE AS A KID/TOM SAWYER. |
Some folk ask if I visualise Jeannie as a kid. I do. When she adopts her tomboy image as an eight-year-old, I see her as a Tom Sawyer urchin kid. I found the image above while browsing and it fits perfectly although he/she is a little older.
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I used Jeannie's figure here as the basis for my
Go West, Girl! front cover.
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My designer's result was pleasing
if not exactly how I imagine her.
No matter. I was just a fussy customer!
I tried hard not to make her too butch in appearance, but I wanted tomboy, slim, athletic, but sexy. Trying to get the balance right was tricky.
As far as her persona goes, that's another thing altogether. As an individual she's complex in some ways yet straight forward in others. She has a habit of telling you straight if she doesn't like you, but if she does like you she keeps it quiet, which really annoys her brothers. She grows devastating in appearance and manner, charismatic and dynamic.
Jeannie grows to love beauty, art and style. She dresses in bohemian male fashion when not on the range and looks gorgeous. She plays the harmonica well and is a great jig dancer and has a sense of beat and rhythm. She adores kids, animals and older people, and, more often than not, they adore her. She has a ribald, irreverent sense of humour when she's not being scary, encouraged by all her frontiersmen and cowboy mates. When she's scary, she's terrifying. I wouldn't like to meet her down a dark alley when she's like that! She can go from totally bonkers and hilarious to frightening at the click of your fingers.
So, yes - I've worked on this forever. I've worked out, more or less, why I'm so fixated on her. It's to do with my mental health issues and depressions which is another subject altogether, which I'll go into another time. Terribly complex.
Here follows a breakdown of her story:
She's difficult as a kid back during the 1860s in New Orleans, not surprisingly because her mother wants little Jeannie to be a lady, being the only daughter among five brothers. But Jeannie has other ideas. She's a natural tomboy and extremely strong willed. She's a leader right from the start, when she begins gathering a bunch of boy mates together. She's not Jeannie, a girl, she's just Jeannie. She does have friends who are girls, and they're tomboy types like herself. She gets into trouble a lot.
She despises a doll given to her as a small child and throws it into New Orleans Pontchartrain Lake with a laugh, but adores her brothers' toys, including a small wooden sword. As she grows, she moans to her Pa, her soulmate, wondering why she can't wear pants like her brothers. He asks her to be patient. The time would come. He adores his little tomboy, but doesn't want to upset her mother.
Her mother tries to get her into a child's corset, but the arguments are so furious her mother becomes exhausted and has to concede. Eventually, aged eight, Jeannie changes her image, cuts her hair and adopts her brother's shirt and pants, although she still wears a dress to school.
Jeannie becomes the Jeannie we know on the trail west. She learns to shoot, hunt game and help maintain the wagon. But she's a gentle, kind kid when it comes to nursing people and animals (animals don't judge), and she's capable of cooking and sewing although she dislikes it. She tells her brothers the necessities of learning to do everything because you never know when you might need to. She witnesses true womanhood - a young man and woman having a candlelit dinner on the trail, as young lovers did occasionally - and vows never to be like that woman, who is treated with such care and reverence by her man. She tells her Pa never to treat her like a girl and he respects that. Jeannie's view of life is extreme but understandable.
Her mother dies on the trail west from tuberculosis and her oldest brother, Rodger, Mother's soulmate, who left New Orleans to study theology back east, hates Jeannie for this, blaming her for his mother's ailments. He's a thorn in Jeannie's side.
The family settle in Wyoming, Pa establishes a cattle ranch and Jeannie becomes a cowgirl. She discovers that she's a natural shot, much to her delight. She eventually becomes a phenomenal shootist, much to the disgust of many of the men around her. She proves herself unbeatable and many men and women fancy her and are often jealous of her charisma and magnetism. Just to complicate the issue she discovers her questionable sexuality and matters take a dangerous turn....
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