My brief, for this illustration of life in a castle, is to draw ‘someone using a well’.
Following the restoration of Pontefract Castle, there’s now a scheme to improve access and restore the ruins at Sandal. I’ll be illustrating various features including the twelve-metre deep well, excavated in the bailey, conveniently close to the privy chamber, the castle’s private apartments.
I’ve tried to imagine the kind of servant who would have been assigned the task of hauling buckets from the well. Although the shaft of the well has been preserved, we can only guess at the arrangement of pulleys or rollers that were used but I’m sure that it would have involved a bucket and rope.
Wooden Poses
I’ve drawn the character on my iPad Pro using an Apple Pencil in the Adobe Fresco drawing program but for the pose I’ve used a 3D figure in Clip Studio Paint, tweaking the pose and the proportions. I felt that he would have developed broad muscular shoulders because of all that heavy lifting.
I’m still at the rough stage but this should give the team designing the interpretation a clear idea of what I have in mind. Just fourteen more illustrations to go . . .
In the days before computers, I’d occasionally use a Polaroid camera to take a photograph of a friend in a particular pose or I’d establish the proportions by setting up an artist’s lay figure, an articulated wooden doll.
Both these methods had disadvantages: under my direction, the friend would be likely to adopt a static self-conscious pose and the lay figure inevitably looked stilted and wooden.
My favourite way to draw people is to go out with a sketchbook and to try to capture their movement and character.
Virtual Brushes
I’ve got a bewildering number of virtual brushes available to me in Fresco including instant cross hatching and screen tones (left).
For the Sandal rough, after tracing the 3D figure with a virtual pencil, I’m going for a quick pen drawing – the one I used here is ‘vintage inks’.
The flat colour goes on a layer below the pen and ink. I outline each area of solid colour with a vector brush – such as ‘basic round’ – then fill using the paint bucket tool.