Category: Drawing

Feet

feet2footIt’s so hot today that I’ve gone into shorts for the first time so this is a good opportunity to switch from drawing hands to feet.

My feet aren’t as weather-beaten as my hands but when it comes to watercolour I still go mainly for yellow ochre and dashes of permanent rose with neutral tint, burnt sienna and raw umber in the shadows.

The drawing with my foot resting on the arm of the sofa gives more descriptive lighting than the one down on our grey sofa because there’s a secondary light from the patio windows filling in the shadow down the right side of my foot.

I’ll try and use secondary lighting to add a touch of drama to some of the frames in my Waterton comic strip. Waterton went barefoot when he climbing trees, so I’m going to have to include feet at some stage.

Soap Opera

SimpsonEdward Thornhill Simpson doesn’t pop up in a puff of smoke through a trap door under a green spotlight like a pantomime villain but, for the purposes of my Waterton comic, he comes as close to that as I can manage within the historical context.

minions
Simpson’s minions at Walton Soap Works.

I keep thinking of the Dollars Trilogy as I stage my action and, as I draw, find myself concocting unlikely scenarios for a three-way shoot-out by introducing Waterton’s other great rival John James Audubon. It would be more dramatic than the long legal battle that ensued but we’ve got to stick to the historical facts.

I’m probably getting drawn into the imagined world that I’m creating a bit too much for my own good but I think that I need to keep improvising, varying my approach, to bring the story to life.

My set design for the Walton Soap Works scene.
My set design for the confrontation between Waterton and Simpson.

When I’m designing a set for the local pantomime I sit halfway down the hall, look towards the stage and sketch the scene that I’m conjuring up in my mind. Although I want to be historically convincing, it’s important to keep that element of light-hearted improvisation.

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Hand Coloured

hand in watercolourWith so many hands to draw for my Waterton comic, I might as well get a bit of practice in while I wait at the hairdressers.

I like the flat colour and confident line used in many comic strips, for example in the Adventures of Tintin, but my wiry pen drawing is better suited to watercolour.

A flat flesh colour wouldn’t give a true impression of the back of my hand which has yellowish and reddish patches plus a variety of browns and warm greys in the shadows. It looks lived in. Using pen and watercolour runs the risk of overloading the comic strip with visual information but I think it’s worth trying to make it work. My section of the story is set in a wildlife sanctuary so watercolour going to work well for the colours and texture of the natural world. In his autobiography, Waterton describes himself as looking as if he has spent his life out of doors in all weathers, so he needs to look like a part of the natural world too.

K is for Keyline

cineworld folkshopping ladiesWith my comic strip project underway I see the world differently. I’m more aware of people in action in colour. But there’s the problem; in the minute it takes for a shopper to trundle along the high street with her trolley or for a cinema-goer to walk to his seat with that vital cup of coffee, I’ve barely time to sketch the basic details, let alone add colour.

I need some kind of colour shorthand but if, for instance, I scribble down ‘bl’ I can find myself wondering later whether I meant blue or black. Similarly ‘gr’ could stand for green or grey.

coffee manpasser bySo how about using the CMYK colour printing process to distinguish the primary colours? Cyan, magenta, yellow and black. The ‘K’, as far as I can discover, stands for the ‘key’ or ‘keyline’ colour, the one that, in the four-colour process, brings the three primaries together by adding a ‘keyline’ to define the image (and to give a bit of solidity to what would otherwise be a rather pastel image).

When I was working on my Richard Bell’s Britain sketchbook, I always used Pelikan Special Brown indian ink for lettering and for the vast majority of my drawings, so Collins experimented by replacing the black that they’d normally use in the printing process with the Pantone equivalent of Special Brown.

handThis warmed up the colour in my drawings compared with the originals and by printing on slightly tinted paper we ended up with a book that looked slightly nostalgic, which wasn’t really my aim. The other extreme, which we also experimented with, would have been to print on the pure white paper that they used for field guides but that gave a rather stark zingy look to my drawings.

Rannoch Moor in Richard Bell's Britain.
Rannoch Moor in Richard Bell’s Britain.

Walton Soap Works

soap comicAt last, I’m getting started on the final artwork for the Charles Waterton comic strip project. I’m starting with the confrontation between Waterton and Mr Simpson the soap manufacturer, whose factory in Walton village has polluted air and stream and killed trees in the Waterton’s park.

Did the soap works look anything like the scene I imagined in my rough? I’ve been unable to track down a photograph of the factory as it was, so using a map in Peter Wright’s 1985 book A History of Walton I made a 3D model in Sketchup.

soap factoryThe factory was built on a triangle of land between the Barnsley Canal and Shay Lane. Shay Lane runs eastwards out of the village towards Crofton. I tried to use the satellite image from Google Earth as my starting point but that got a bit fiddly as I’m not familiar with the program so I started with a blank and drew out the buildings on the ground plane by eye, then I extruded them up into 3D objects using the Push Pull Tool.

soap factoryWith the two chimneys this isn’t so very different to the scene I conjured up from imagination but it’s not quite what I need for the showdown scene, so I’ll take the essential features from it and bring them together to make it a bit more dramatic.

A photograph taken after the factory closed shows that the canal ran past the soap works on an embankment, so the barges were passing by at roof level.

In Search of Sea Monsters

sea monsters comicMy first attempt at putting together a comic strip using Manga Studio EX5. Still a lot to learn, but I’ve managed the basics. On a short trip to Hornsea last September, we’d taken Map Art Lab with us for some crafty inspiration and the project that we had in mind was to design our own version of the sea monsters that were drawn as decorations on maps during the age of exploration.

Rough Stuff

rough for comicAt last, I’ve had a look through the script for the Charles Waterton comic and I’m onto the first pencil roughs stage, quickly going through the scenes doing what in the theatre would be called blocking in; planning the movement of characters. Even with something as chaotic as a punch-up with poachers I don’t want to keep changing the point of view too much so that, for instance, the character on the left is inexplicably on the right in the next frame. Based on a true incident recalled by Charles Waterton, this near fatal fracas ends up with a touch of Laurel and Hardy slapstick because, Waterton tells us, the poacher ran away with his hat and he ended up with the poacher’s.

Despite having read the Dummies book and watching several video tutorials, I’m still struggling to get up to speed with Manga Studio EX4 but at least it is easy to draw up the panels to see how much action I need to fit onto each page. I might very well draw the panels by hand in the final artwork, I haven’t decided on that yet, but at this stage I’m happy to have a grid to work in. Obviously I wouldn’t go for such thick ruled borders alongside my pen and ink drawings.

I can see the advantage of getting friends in to choreograph the fight and take reference photographs but at the moment fast pencil sketches, getting the gist of the action, are all that I need.

Great Graphic Disasters

milestoneI was so looking forward to seeing my article in the local newsletter but, an illustrator’s worst nightmare, something went  horribly wrong between the 300 dpi image I supplied and the print version!

Both reproduced here at 100 dpi, but I think you get the picture. Which is more than the readers of the newsletter will. John Welding says it looks as if the image has been converted to black and white, which is not recommended for anything scanned at less than 600 dpi.

DPI, does it stand for Disaster Prone Image?

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Hands and High Street

High Street
handI’m feeling relaxed enough, as we wait for our bagels in the Caffé Capri, to draw a high-speed sketch of the view up Horbury High Street. After all, if it doesn’t turn out to be precisely in the correct perspective, what does it matter? It’s not like me to say that, is it?!

handNo vase of flowers to draw in the hairdressers today, so it’s back to hands.

Hands, yes my perennial subject but not a bad one to mug up on with my Waterton comic strip project looming. Twelve pages, eight frames per page, and average of, say two people in each frame, that’s 12 x 8 x 2 figures, about 192 figures, each with two hands so that could be a total of 384 hands to draw!

I need to keep practicing.

Exercise Book Encyclopaedia

Self portrait aged 17 in my Batley art college days. Page 683, the title page volume 11.
Self portrait aged 17 in my Batley art college days. Page 683, the title page volume 11. Perhaps I was being a bit over ambitious in my subject matter!

exercise booksThis little pile of exercise books spans a decade of my creative endeavours.

In the winter of 1971 in volume 14 (page 741 as I’d numbered it as if it was part-work) I wrote; ‘Exercise Book Encyclopaedia apologizes for any incovienience (I didn’t have access to a spell-checker in those days!) caused by the intrusion of notes for a thesis, an enquiry into the nature and causes of invertebrate illustration . . . ‘

In the final year of my diploma in art and design, I finally accepted that my real life projects had finally caught up with this naturalist’s notebook come comic strip part-work. It had been my blank canvas. I remember the milestone of starting a fresh, crisp new exercise book, but every fresh page was an opportunity to experiment with a different layout.

I walked past Mr Chapel’s print workshop on my way to school and dreamt of walking in there with my book and getting it printed. As he worked in letterpress, monochrome only, that would have been impossible. How on earth did people break into print?

eclipse 1961
Eclipse of the Sun, from my exercise book, Thursday, 16 February 1961.

exercise booksI’d started, aged nine on Tuesday 14 February 1961, by writing about a journey through the Pennines, collecting a sample of millstone grit for our natural history club museum and ended in 1971 as I started work on my thesis, on a geological theme too with an article reflecting the buzz of excitement that I felt about the then fairly new theory of plate tectonics.

I’m impressed by how far my work came on in ten years (which doesn’t seem a terribly long period from the perspective of my present age) and I’m glad that I’ve still got my schoolboy enthusiasm for geology and astronomy. I’m still so keen to try and understand the world.

Here’s part of that first article from 1961:

“I brought some rock back for the museum and found out about the life of heather. A parable goes seed thrown on rocks withers away. But this is not so with the heather. The seed falls on the rock the roots sprout and go along the rock with new plants sprouting all the time (this is why we find heather growing in clumps). The roots will not stop growing until they reach the soil. We also saw some fieldfares which I will tell you about tomorrow.”

My first drawing in the 'encyclopaedia', 15 February 2015.
My first drawing in the ‘encyclopaedia’, 15 February 2015.

I think that I could surreptitiously slip that passage into my present day Dalesman nature diary and it would just about get past my editor with little more than a raised eyebrow.