Month: July 2015

Poachers in Colour

poachersI finished adding cross-hatching to the last of the battle with the poachers panels this morning and I’ve spent the afternoon adding colour.

fist fightWhat a difference it makes both to the atmosphere of the page and in colour coding the characters so that in the tangle of battling bodies you’ve got a chance of distinguishing which arm and leg belongs to which character.

fightingFor sketching I always use a water-brush but with such a large area to fill I took a number 11, and later a number 7, sable brush from the drawer and for the first time in months took out my large box of Winsor and Newton artists’ watercolours.

dropping the knifeI opted for the large box because I wanted to run the colours into each other so I needed several separate divisions in the palette (my regular bijou box has only two divisions). To give an impression of a rainy evening, I stuck to a limited palette of cobalt blue, yellow ochre and sepia with just a touch of nickel titanium yellow (a lemon yellow) for the lightest areas of the grass and a hint of scarlet lake for the lips.

Waterton overcome

This page has been so different to the Soap Works confrontation because there’s so much action going on. My new broad-nibbed Lamy Safari pen (filled with Noodler’s black) has been a catalyst for me to rethink my approach and I’ve come up with what I’d call a loose Victorian engraving style which I think suits the subject but, more importantly, which I feel more at ease with it, so I should be able to work more quickly from now on and enjoy what I’m doing.

There’s no rule that you shouldn’t enjoy artwork, even when you’re working on an important commission.

stranglehold

What you’re not seeing here are the speech balloons although in this frame I think all that Waterton would be able to say in this stranglehold would be ‘Arrgh!’ The ruled borders to the frames, which I’ll add in Manga Studio, will cut off the ragged edges of the rectangular panels, giving the strip a crisper feel. I made an exception and drew the frame for this central scene, using a compass with a ruling pen attachment that I bought when I was working on my first book A Sketchbook of the Natural History of the Country Round Wakefield, which coincidently features a short Waterton comic strip.

kick-off

I’m glad that as I went on through the frames on this page I became more relaxed in my drawing. My favourite panel is the close-up of the poacher being forced to drop the knife but this panel of Waterton making a rally and with one last effort kicking the poacher away, is the most lively looking of the bunch and a good example of how I’d be able to use a bit of hatching in any scene, not just a night scene like this one.

By the way, this cut-to-white illustration of battling figures won’t have a ruled border.

The victorThis last frame of Waterton seeing off the poacher is one of the most awkward, as I was experimenting with the woodcut technique of shading. I don’t rule out doing it again, if it appears totally out of context with the rest of the page but I’ll wait until I’ve seen it in with ruled edges and with no less than three speech bubbles. Those formalities should tie it in with the rest of the artwork.

Black Freighter, Yellow Pen

poachers, Lamy Safari penfisticuffsBlack humour, everyday characters but real menace; that’s just the atmosphere that I’m looking for in my battle with poachers scene for the Waterton comic. This morning I’m getting a bit of inspiration from Radio 3; Lotte Lenya singing Pirate Jenny from Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera, lyrics by Bertolt Brecht. Jenny, the much put upon maid in a ‘crummy hotel’ conjures up a ‘Black Freighter’ with 50 long cannons and a pirate crew running into hundreds to reek her dreadful revenge on the entire town, with the exception of her ‘crummy hotel’.

fight sceneIt’s funny but chilling and there’s a mischievous, improvised quality to the performance. I feel that I can learn from it by aiming to build a feeling of menace in a situation that has an underlying ridiculousness. Hitchcock did that so well. The poachers episode of the Waterton story has elements of the petty villainy of Bill Sykes but also of Laurel and Hardy slapstick. Not to mention Brecht’s Mack the Knife.

In these eight panels of the comic strip, Charles Waterton risks being shot, stabbed and strangled but, at the end of the tussle, he and the poacher end up with each other’s hats. Which is what really happened.

Lamy Safari Broad Nib

Lamy Safari with Z24 converter and broad nib, filled with Noodler's Black ink.
Lamy Safari with Z24 converter and broad nib, filled with Noodler’s Black ink.

I ordered a yellow pen so that I don’t confuse my new Lamy Safari with the three Safaris and the AlStar that I’m already using. I’ve gone for a broad nib because I feel that the foreground figures need to stand out more.

lamy fine and broad nibs
As you’d expect, the broad nib is freer flowing than the fine.

I like the bolder look so much that I use it for the whole scene. In my first attempt at adding the shadows to one of the frames I went for a traditional woodcut look in which is areas of black are surrounded by hatching (below, left). But I’m not totally comfortable with this style as I don’t have a background in printmaking.

Woodcut versus Hatching

Hatching and cross-hatching.
Hatching and cross-hatching.
Woodcut effect.
Woodcut effect.

What I’m used to is sketchbook drawings which involve no forward planning, other than deciding where to start on the page. I like to pick up a pen start making marks. This may produce a fussy effect that the preplanned graphic crispness of the woodcut style, but it can also give a more improvised look.

It’s a rather naive way of working, one which reminds me of Glen Baxter’s parodies of literal Boys Own Paper style drawings of unlikely misadventures. That seems appropriate for Charles Waterton’s Quixotic adventures, provided that I can keep a hint of menace running through it.

A Warning from Waterton

Waterton warns the poacherThanks to various disruptions, I’m taking a while to get to the end of my battle with the poachers page but here we as the poacher runs off and Waterton warns him ‘You will NOT touch the birds in MY park!’

Needless to say, the poacher protests that this is a waste because it’s great game.

Taking a stand taking a standWorking from my rough I tried having Squire Waterton in the foreground but it’s awkward to have him looking into the picture and to see the expression on his face. Why not, I thought, try and convey the Squire’s resolute mood in his body language?

At first I tried having him springing into action but this threw him off balance. In fact he looks like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever!

How about having him stand his ground. I thought of boxers at a weigh in, trying to look rock solid.

night sceneI’m not happy with my first attempts at shading for this night scene but we’ll have to see what it looks like when I add the watercolour. Once again, it’s the lively little sketch of the standing figure that appeals to me more than the laboured shaded version.

I might end up using watercolour only rather than inked and hatched shadows.

Poacher Punch-up

punch upI’ve been using my new light pad a lot transferring roughs to the final artwork and, in this case, from initial rough to a cleaned up version. As you can see, I started this in pencil then defined it in ink.

strangleholdHaving gone to so much care with the second rough, there didn’t seem any point in tracing it in pencil onto the watercolour paper so I traced it in ink, trying to be free and relaxed in my line. That saves not only the stage of tracing in pencil onto the watercolour paper, but also a lot of rubbing out once the pen line has dried.

As a drawing, I prefer the rough, which is animated because of the pencil construction lines however I hope the final pen drawing will come to life when I add inked shadows and finally watercolour.

The Fight with Poachers

fight with poachersI’m acting as fight arranger this morning. As I pencil and then start inking the fight with poachers page I’m ironing out some of the inconsistencies in my roughs, always with clarity in telling the story as my main consideration.

handfightFor instance in my first version of the frame in which Waterton forces the poacher to drop the knife, I realised that the knife was falling the wrong way, as if the poacher had been holding it upside down.

Manga Now!

Manga Now! by Keith Sparrow and The Big Painting Challenge by Rosa Roberts.
Manga Now! by Keith Sparrow and The Big Painting Challenge by Rosa Roberts. Wish that I had time to go through the tutorials in both these books but at least they can give me a few tips for aspects of my comic strip.

I’ve always been sceptical of those ‘how to draw super-heroes’ books but in drawing this fight scene I can see the need for some kind of a system for getting dynamic figures convincingly onto paper. It’s more like choreography than life drawing. I’ve drawn my hand hundreds of times but always in a relaxed position.

I like this scribbly attempt to draw my hand in the right position as a drawing but it's not much use as reference for my comic strip.
I like this scribbly attempt to draw my hand in the right position as a drawing but it’s not much use as reference for my comic strip.

I tried one of Keith Sparrow’s suggestions in Manga Now! and put a small mirror on the desk to check out the outspread hand for the poacher dropping the knife but I couldn’t get my hand into the correct perspective nor could I hold the pose in the twisted outstretched position (too many cups of tea at breakfast time, as usual!)  and nor could I effectively sketch it single handed. Another problem is that my fingers are long so my hands don’t have the proportions that I need for my powerfully built poacher character.

I’d struggle in a similar way if I tried to take a photograph my hand so I’m concluding that building up the hand in simple block form (above), another suggestion in Keith Sparrow’s Manga Now!, is going to be the best way for me to get the dynamic hands in this story doing exactly what I want them to.

Link; Keith Sparrow author of  Manga Now! How to Draw Action Figures

Light pad

light padLast week I was struggling to use my perspex drawing board as a lightbox in the bright sunlight even with the studio blind down and I had to resort to tracing from my rough to watercolour paper on the back bedroom window. This Huion A4 LED light pad, delivered today, is a great improvement.

light padWorking in the confines of a single panel I find that I tend to squeeze my figures in. When I look at them I feel that the proportion isn’t quite right. They look like figures trying to squeeze into a lift but with such a cropped view it’s difficult to see what’s going wrong.

With the light pad I can transfer from a problem figure on the watercolour paper to a sheet of layout paper then work out the pose including the parts of the figure that fall outside the boundary of the frame.

light padThe layout paper then goes under the watercolour paper and I can pencil in, then ink in, the improved version of the figure.

Link; Huion LED light pad

The Bold Poachers

Hawker
My rough and detail from George Walker’s illustration, 1814, the dog handler holding back the hounds in  a hunt in open country with hawks.

moor guide 1814Sometimes I come across the perfect source of reference. In this first frame of my comic strip version of the fight between Waterton and the poachers in Walton Park I drew the astonished poacher realising that he’d been tricked by Waterton into firing at a wooden decoy pheasant. Googling for images of Yorkshire workers and countrymen in the early Victorian period, I came across George Walker’s Costume of Yorkshire, a book that I’ve used in my research on several previous occasions.

It’s hard to believe, seeing the two of them together (above), but I drew the rough before I stumbled across the Walker illustration. It’s so similar, with the exception of those lapels, that I have to wonder whether the image was lingering in my mind from when I last browsed through the book. Probably not, but this is the archetypal image that I have of an early Victorian countryman.

My scene takes place in 1835 and Walker published his book in 1814, but I think that country workers and their poacher rivals would be fairly conservative in their dress at that time.

For the other poacher, in my rough I’d gone for a powerful looking man with mutton chop whiskers and therefore too similar to the villain from the soap works scene, Edward Thornhill Simpson.

Again, George Walker comes to the rescue. His moor guide (left) will be my model for the other poacher.

Walker’s drawings were kept for many years at Walton Hall in the collection of Edward Hailstone. In the introduction to a new edition of Costume of Yorkshire, written at Walton Hall in the Easter 1885, Hailstone writes;

‘like his intimate friend Mr. Waterton of Walton Hall, [Walker]would constantly be out at early dawn in the summer months, to watch the habits of the feathered race.’

One further link; Hailstone rented Walton Hall on a long term lease from the soap manufacturing Simpson family, who had bought the property from Waterton’s son Edmund.

Link; George Walker’s Costume of Yorkshire on Calderdale Council’s From Weaver to Web online visual archive of Calderdale history.

It was 40 years ago today

ric 040775

Forty years ago today was my last day at college. Here I am with the painting of birds in the Royal College of Art greenhouse, that I’d started three years earlier and which I thought might be a six week job . . .

Pencil Roughs

pencil roughspoacher v. WatertonI find pencil roughs the quickest way to develop my ideas. I’ve got a wonderful program, Manga Studio, which can easily handle this process but pencil, eraser and the occasional spot of Tipp-Ex correction fluid makes for a more hands on, tactile way of working.

Referring back to the script, I’m going through the basic outline of my first storyboard-style roughs, trying to add drama, clarity and a more interesting layout.

Stubble

stubbleWe’ve had a little round of appointments to catch up with over the last couple of days, not just the dentist’s and doctor’s, where I made the two sketches in the waiting rooms, but also the opticians where I had a fitting for my new glasses (same frames but with new high tech varifocal 100% UV proof lenses) so we deserved a lunch break at the Seed Room, where I drew the view looking north over Smithy Brook Valley and Thornhill Edge.dentists and doctors