Perhaps the reason that I find cars so difficult to draw is that they’re almost human. Headlights can be like eyes, so, as when drawing a portrait of a human, if you don’t get the shapes or proportions right, you can lose the likeness. If I drew cars often enough, I might get to the stage where I could take liberties and come up with a caricature.
The first car got driven off just before I got a chance to add colour. As I added colour to the second, a Fiat Punto, I realised that because a car is so shiny it mirrors its environment with a reflection of the sky highlighting the roof and the reflection of the tarmac adding to the shadows below.
The knife, fork and spoon slots of a cutlery drawer divider are ideal for pens, pencils and rulers. The section where you’d store your corkscrew and corn-on-the-cob skewers comes in for compass, Pritt sticks and pencil sharpener.
This A2 sized drawer is one from a six drawer unit from Ikea but every one of these drawers had sagged over the past three years. Last weekend I dismantled them and glued all the grooves that support the hardboard base. While I was at it, I sprayed some WD40 on the metal runners. And I even went to the effort of testing each pen on scrap paper to whittle down my collection.
There was no lead in this propelling pencil, but it’s definitely one to keep. It was either given to me, or I claimed it from my mum in my school or student days, so my guess is that it could date from the 1930s.
A carving that I made in the woodwork class at grammar school has come in useful for stopping my current reading collapsing over onto the modem on my bookshelf.
A windy day disrupted the railways when we went into Leeds yesterday. On the return journey I drew bare trackside trees, a birch hanging on to the last of its ochre leaves and a gull weaving its way into the headwind.
Two hours is a long time to spend in a waiting room but on the other hand . . . this is the most time that I’ve had for a sketching session for months. That is, sketching as opposed to sitting at my desk working on a comic strip. I have done plenty of that.
My habit of drawing my hand when there’s nothing more inspiring to draw (or when it seems socially unacceptable to gawp at people, as in this waiting room) paid off when I was drawing my comic strip. It wasn’t easy to draw all those hands but at least alarm bells would ring if I drew something that didn’t look quite right, for instance the time when I was so wrapped up in my drawing that I drew a hand with one thumb and five fingers!
Capital at the Casbah
I did manage to get out for a brunch break and headed for the Cafe Casbah where I had time, after demolishing the eggs Benedict, to draw the cast iron capital of one of the pillars in the Redbrick Mill.
I’ve spent so much time during the last three months sitting at my desk drawing men in top hats, so what do I do now that my contribution to the Waterton comic is finished and I can get out to social events again?
This is Mr Oxley, proprietor of the Palace of Curiosities, a Victorian Traveling Sideshow that has rolled into town as part of the celebrations to mark the centenary of the death of Charles Waterton 150 years ago.
To rival Squire Waterton’s Nondescript, John Bull and the National Debt and the Noctifer, Mr Oxley is showcasing a ‘completely genuine’ mermaid, mummies and a grisly selection of Grand Guignol horrors.
Today’s frame from my Waterton comic; Edmund, son of Charles Waterton, has gone into a Frodo-like trance as he examines a papal ring. The pope, Pius IX, looks on; is that a blessing or is it the gesture used by a hypnotist when he takes control of his subject’s mind?
I find myself wanting to yell out ‘Don’t trust him Edmund!’ but, with his waxed moustache, Edmund himself looks like a smooth-operating Victorian villain.
This looks like a Punch cartoon but I can’t decipher the signature of the artist.
In my original rough I’d imagined the pope as a distant figure but, when I googled Pius IX, I found portraits of a shrewd looking character who I’m guessing was very hands-on in his Papacy. I’m sure that he would have known every member of his staff, and known how to handle them. You can see in his portraits that he could project a good-natured spiritual radiance, but he doesn’t come over as a reclusive monk-like figure. I think that he would have had no difficulty winning the day at the First Vatican Council, which established the doctrine of papal infallibility.
Edmund rose as far as a layman could in the Catholic hierarchy, so the two men must have known each other. Pius died in 1878, one year after the death of Edmund who was thirty-eight years younger than the pope he served.
Pius reminds me Marlon Brando in The Godfather but not as sinister. Perhaps he acted as mentor to Edmund, rather like the relationship between Professor Dumbledore and Harry Potter.
Victorian cartoonists could see that Pius was as capable of raising two fingers in admonishment as easily as in benediction.
Detail (about 3 inches square in the original) of Edmund from my comic illustration. Lamy AlStar with Noodlers black ink, Winsor & Newton watercolours.
Edmund became a collector of rings and part of his collection will be on display at Wakefield Museum towards the end of this year. One of his interests was in papal rings. These are oversized, apparently designed to fit over a glove, and made of base metals. They typically carry the coat of arms of a pope, or sometimes those of a king.
I’ve enjoyed the detective work involved in researching the scene in my comic strip biography in which we meet the Waterton family at home in Walton Hall. I’ve been unable to track down any portraits of Charles Waterton’s young sisters-in-law, the Miss Edmonstones, so photographs of their close relatives have been the next best thing but I’ve also found a clue from art history.
As I understand it, Eliza and Helen, were, like Waterton’s late wife Ann, half Scottish, half Arawak. Whether this is true or not, I can take Edmund, the only son of Waterton and Ann as my starting point for the Edmonstone look. In photographs, he has a broad face and tightly curled hair which I’ve also found in a photograph of a Josephine Waterton, who I assume is Edmund’s daughter.
St Catherine, detail from an etching by Maratta.
Ann Waterton died shortly after the birth of Edmund in April 1830. Charles later acquired a painting of St Catherine by Carlo Maratta (1625-1713) which he felt bore a close resemblance to Ann. I’m unable to track down this particular painting but Maratta’s models for St Catherine and the Virgin Mary do have a similar look to the photograph of Josephine.
The hair style and the full-sleeved dress in Maratta’s etching of St Catherine aren’t so different to the fashions of the early 1830s that I’m using in my illustration.
Charles Waterton’s seal on a letter dated 2 June 1855.
Although I’ve yet to discover a portrait photograph of Charles Waterton himself, there are contemporary sketches, a bust and a portrait, plus a death mask which I have yet to arrange to see.
Links; An icon in York Art Gallery, Virgin with a Breast on her Neck appears to have links with Edmund. He liked to style himself ‘Lord of Walton Hall’ and he collected rings so I think that the flamboyant seal on the back of the York painting must be Edmund’s. Charles Waterton’s seal (left), was a simpler affair.
My reference for fashions from the Wonderful 1830s, from Whilhelmina’s Antique Fashion blog.
Waterton looks suitably sepulchral as, in 1830, in what could be seen as a kind of penance, he takes to sleeping on the bare boards of his work-room after the death of his young wife soon after she gave birth to their son Edmund.
In a moonlit room, the lightest tone is going to be the sky seen through the window but I’m going to have to redraw all or part of this frame of my section of the Waterton comic because I need more emphasis on the figure of Waterton. Your eyes adapt to the varying levels of illumination as you look around a dimly lit room, so I feel justified in introducing silvery highlights to the main subject. Could I also introduce a few beams of light streaking down from the window. That might be overdoing it but it would be fun to try.
I rearranged the furniture slightly from my first floor plan, using doll’s house furniture made by my great great uncle Joe Truelove for my mum c. 1924.
Any of our Pageant Players’ dramas or farces set in a room called for what our producer called a box set, which was constructed of 12 x 4ft flats, one or two with doors in them. There were often French windows too. I feel as if I’ve been designing a theatre set for this introductory scene to Act 2 of my Waterton comic.
After thinking about the spaces on the upper floor of Walton Hall, I’ve focussed on one corner into which I can fit all the points mentioned in Norman Moore’s description of Charles Waterton’s work-room. I was going to omit the fireplace but as an old map of Guiana hung above the mantlepiece, it has to be included.
In this scene, Waterton is lying awake with a tear welling up in his eye. I’ll have to leave that detail to the reader’s imagination because I want to include the whole of his recumbent figure, lying there on the bare boards like an Egyptian mummy. The lighting and the bare boards serve to tell the story of his loneliness after his bereavement.
Designing a Victorian room that reflects eccentric interests and a colourful adventures of its occupant makes me think of the various room sets that I’ve seen for Sherlock Holmes’ consulting rooms at 221b Baker Street.
I’ve found the Huion light-pad that I bought for tracing my roughs equally useful for sorting slides, when I was searching for my 1977 photographs of Walton Hall before its restoration.
I’ve been struggling to get this knife to break out of the frame, cutting across the border in the program that I’m using to lay out my comic strip artwork, Manga Studio EX5. Even after watching a YouTube tutorial by Manga Studio doyen Doug Hills, I’ve had to go back to Photoshop, which I’ve been using since the 1990s, to the cut around the artwork. There must be a way to do that in Manga Studio, but I’m not there yet.
Pasting up the comic on screen is a flexible way of working but the finished product will be printed on A4 paper so, as I’m now a quarter of the way through the project, I decided it was a good time to print out my pages to see how it’s all coming together.
I like the splash of colour in the opening frame and the low key colour of the soap works page but my favourite frame so far is the one where the poacher is forced to drop his knife. And it looks even better with the knife looming out of the frame and coming towards you!
Perhaps the reason that I find cars so difficult to draw is that they’re almost human. Headlights can be like eyes, so, as when drawing a portrait of a human, if you don’t get the shapes or proportions right, you can lose the likeness. If I drew cars often enough, I might get to the stage where I could take liberties and come up with a caricature.
The first car got driven off just before I got a chance to add colour. As I added colour to the second, a Fiat Punto, I realised that because a car is so shiny it mirrors its environment with a reflection of the sky highlighting the roof and the reflection of the tarmac adding to the shadows below.
I’ve spent so much time during the last three months sitting at my desk drawing men in top hats, so what do I do now that my contribution to the Waterton comic is finished and I can get out to social events again?
