Category: Drawing

Pictures on a Page

I ALWAYS like the stage where I’ve got sufficient illustrations and text together to start laying out the pages of a book. I’ve been worrying about whether this or that illustration is the best I can do and naturally I’ll continue to fret over that but it’s worth dropping them into a page layout to remind myself that they were never intended to be works of art, to be scrutinised in isolation. I need to see how they work as part of a spread.

Seeing them on-screen in my desktop publishing programme isn’t enough; I need to print out one or two sample spreads. My laser printer isn’t going to give me the look of a real paperback but it serves as a guide. I feel that books should be tactile but, with its line artwork, it occurs to me that this would a good title to try publishing as an e-book.

The pen and ink lines have a crispness about them in print that I can’t show you on a 100 dot per inch screen. My commercial printer advises me to scan line work at 1200 dots per inch, which is the maximum my desktop CanoScan 8800F is capable of.

Whatever my misgivings about each cartoon, I’m pleased with the way they do the job of illuminating the definitions of Victorian Yorkshire dialect words and expressions that are the subject of my book. I’m going a bit over the top by including so many cartoons but if the book was a text-only list of definitions it would run the risk of looking rather academic.

The variation in style in the illustrations, as I struggled to find the best approach, isn’t a disadvantage as it adds some variety but I do have my favourites: the drinkers on a bench in the first spread and the beetle and mole in the second.

Starl-ink

THIS DRAWING of a Starling was made with my ArtPen and inked in with a Sakuyo Japanese brush using Calli Jet Black India ink. It’s on Goldline layout paper, which is 50 gsm bank paper; very smooth and semi-transparent.

With no bleed the bank paper isn’t letting the ink lines run into the fibres of the paper, which was a problem with the soft cartridge I was using the other day, but because layout paper is so thin it’s just about on the limit of being able to take a dense wash of India ink. There’s some cockling but very little sign of the ink soaking its way through the thin paper.

A Bunch of Five

HERE ARE this afternoon’s little bunch of illustrations. The problem with drawing this schoolmaster’s breakfast (another of the odd subjects that I need for my book), is that at this scale – a scale sufficient to make a plate of bacon and eggs recognisable – the characters begin to take over. Well, the schoolboy is reasonably bland but the schoolmaster seems to be taking on a personality of his own. All that is needed here is an archetypal Victorian teacher.

‘What did he (or she) eat for breakfast?’ is one of the questions a novelist is supposed to be able to answer when creating a character. In this case the breakfast is the subject and anything else is a distraction.

I could have drawn this tangle of wool (left) just by itself but to make it appear truly knotty, I decided to include a figure trying to unravel it.

On the other hand this split-pin latch is distinctive enough not to need the help of a cartoon character to demonstrate it.

Crunchy wheat-cakes are next on the menu and they too are sufficiently self-explanatory . . . or do I need an ear of two of wheat lying beside them to distinguish them from oatcakes?

Finally, here’s one of those long benches from a traditional ale-house. This definitely requires the addition of a group of drinkers because otherwise it might look like a church pew.

Of the illustrations that I’ve produced so far, this comes nearest to the look that I want for my book. I’ve established my characters without letting them take over the cartoon, the balance of line and tone seems about right and should be suitable for the method of printing and I’m beginning to build up a homely and somehow familiar Victorian world, which suits my theme.

On the strength of this afternoon’s illustrations, I could reasonably expect to turn out ten illustrations a day . . . if, indeed, I ever get a day when I don’t have some other errand to run.

In the Dragon’s Den

In this week’s Dragon’s Den (BBC2 television) there were a couple of twins with a background in the fashion industry who were seeking a large investment in ‘Brat and Suzie’, a distinctive fashion label they’d recently launched. The quirky originality of their range depends mainly on the specially commissioned illustrations printed on each garment of animals engaged in various activities (for example, a raccoon riding a bicycle).

The ‘Dragons’ asked for some financial details;

“What are you paying for your illustrations?”

“Oh. It’s quite small; we pay for each illustrator a £20 flat fee. We blog about them and help them out as much as we can.”

“So they see it as a way of getting their illustrations around.”

Yes, a business that depends so much on the skill of the illustrators, with a turnover of a hundred thousand pounds and the illustrator walks away with enough money to buy him or herself a pizza and a glass of wine.

That sounds like a good business plan.

Coltsfoot and a Crowd

I’M GRADUALLY getting there with the drawing style for my latest book. During our weekend away I picked up a copy of Private Eye at a station bookstall as my holiday reading. It was useful to be reminded how simply drawn cartoons can make a point so successfully. Private Eye is currently celebrating 50 years of publication and during its first half century the satirical magazine has stuck to newsprint for its pages, so they should have a pretty good idea of what works best in the medium by now.

Coming back to my drawing of Coltsfoot (top left), which I’d made a start on before we went away, I decided that I needed to simplify my design. When I’m drawing a flower from nature I like to include every detail that I see. My aim is to study the plant itself so who am I to decide what is or is not relevant.

These illustrations call for a different strategy. Real life can be confusing and I need to strip down reality to a few easily grasped essentials. Hopefully I can still catch the spirit of the subject.

Coltsfoot is a spring flower, so there’s none around for me to draw at the moment but working from a photograph was tending to make my drawing too literal. Instead, I’ve referred to a Victorian copy of Culpeper’s Herbal and tried to go for the simplicity of the coltsfoot illustrated on one of the colour plates.

Drawing a Crowd

I need to show a group of people crowding around a fire but with so many bodies blocking the view I couldn’t show the hearth itself. The tapering chimney breast isn’t typical of Victorian buildings but I felt that it gave more of a clue that the group were gathering at a fireside.

 

Highland Journey

WE’RE SPENDING Friday travelling up and Monday travelling back again so the East Coast rail journey of our weekend in Inverness is one half of our short break in the Highlands. It’s too long since we’ve been here – well over 20 years. We get to Scotland once or twice a year but rarely get any further than Edinburgh or Glasgow.

We’ve always driven here, so it’s 31 years since I last travelled up by rail. The names of the stations conjure up memories of my journeys to summer and Easter stints as a volunteer osprey warden in my student days; Gleneagles, Pitlochary, Blairgowrie and Kingussie on the countdown to Aviemore. After a year in Leeds or London at art college, going through the rugged pass north of Blair Atholl, with its screes and cascading streams felt like crossing the border into another world of primeval landscapes and spectacular wildlife.

Food and drink on the train are included as part of our bargain break, as we’ve upgraded to first class for the eight hour journey so I indulge in a miniature of Famous Grouse blended whisky as we drink in the landscape as the train pulls out of Gleneagles.

“I don’t normally drink whisky,” I explain to the stewardess, “but I felt I should as we’re entering the Highlands.”

“These aren’t the Highlands!” she retorted.

“Yes, but Gleneagles sounds like the Highlands.”

This reminds me of my three day Highland Tour with Dr Stephen Cribb whose book Whisky on the Rocks I illustrated. Famous Grouse is a blended whisky but the book investigated the geological story behind the process water – usually spring water – used in distilling single malt whiskies.

The taste and bouquet of the blended whisky brings back our visits to some of the famous single malt distilleries on our research trip. Places such Speyside and, north of Inverness, Tain where they make Glenmorangie. We didn’t have time to visit any island distilleries unfortunately.

Muddy Boots #2

I’M TRYING not to agonise about my artwork for my current project – it’s supposed to be fun, remember! – but there are still decisions to be made in getting over a concept with clarity, and perhaps a touch of humour.

I’ve got an illustration of muddy boots to do – what could be simpler? Well, I think my first pen drawing (above, middle) looks too much like crumbly material while my second looks more like porridge than mud!

And then the boots; it’s a Victorian setting so should those be riding boots . . . or would hob-nail working boots look more down to earth? Decisions, decisions!

Perhaps I should refer to the photograph that I took of my own boots in a muddy field in the Rhubarb Triangle, back in my diary for January.

Once again, in this illustration of an unsteady horse, I find myself preferring my pencil sketch (above, left) to my finished pen and ink drawing.

I’ve got at least 100, probably more like 200 of these illustrations to draw, so I’m not going to dwell on any particular illustration. After a while I should develop a ‘house style’ and then, reviewing the whole book, if there are any illustrations that stand out as looking particularly awkward, I can soon redraw them.

 

The Parker and the Padfoot

I’M INTENDING to illustrate my next book (not the Sherlock Holmes, that’s going to have to wait, but a new, less involved idea that came to me this week) in black and white line, so this morning I got some of my fountain pens in working order again, including three of these Parker Reflex pens. I’ve got used to using my ArtPens with waterproof Noodler’s ink as this suits my everyday pen and watercolour wash drawing but I’d like to experiment with something that’s just a bit more fluid and inky to create a rather different visual identity for my new book.

I drew this vinegar bottle in the fish and chip restaurant yesterday using my extra fine-nibbed ArtPen with Noodler’s black ink and you can see the difference compared with the dunnock (right), drawn with a fine-nibbed ArtPen loaded with a black ArtPen ink cartridge. The ArtPen ink isn’t waterproof, so I can’t use it as I would the Noodler’s in conjunction with a watercolour wash.

Padfoot

I decided to try out the pens on a randomly chosen cartoon illustration for my new book, which includes, as one of its themes, creatures from local folklore. All we know of Padfoot is that it was a four-footed supernatural animal with saucer-shaped eyes which waylaid people on dark nights in lonely places.

I prefer my sketchy rough (above, right) in the fine-nibbed ArtPen to this more stylised version in ArtPen with solid black added with a Pentel Brush Pen. I want to have fun with this project so I think that I should be going for the rougher line version, which seems to come more naturally to me but then part of having fun with drawing is in trying out new approaches, so I’ve still got an open mind.

I’ll just have one more try and then move onto a fresh subject. The vagueness of the apparition of Padfoot was one of its main characteristics. It padded along softly behind you and if you looked back at it you’d see a shadowy, half-real creature in the hedgerow.

My final attempt has gone too far towards Dracula gothic and by putting trees on either side of the path I’ve implied that Padfoot’s natural habitat was woodland. You’d be more likely to meet it on a lonely byway.

The Jester of Kirklees

On a lighter note, I need an illustration of the Jester of Kirklees. I think this kind of cartoon style is going to be more successful for the book. My drawings are intended to illustrate specific points, not to be stand-alone drawings in their own right. I don’t, for instance, like to go over lines in an observational drawing but to give this cartoon a graphic look – something along the lines of a woodcut – I’ve gone over the outlines with the ArtPen.

Next, I have to illustrate a rough and ready form of clearing weeds using a spade; this book is nothing if not varied and that’s the appeal of illustrating it.

The Man in the Straw Hat

Then there’s a particular sort of straw hat. It’s associated with a local character who I’ve tried to depict here but the trouble is his character then dominates the drawing; it’s actually the straw hat that counts here.

So here’s my second version in which the straw hat takes centre stage.

 

Art Bag

MONDAY MORNING and I’m playing the waiting game again; my Mantaray art bag seems the most appealing subject that I have available so I draw it in ArtPen and Noodler’s black ink and have time to add a watercolour wash of Sepia, Neutral Tint, Yellow Ochre and Winsor Yellow for the press studs.

Published
Categorized as Drawing

Greenhouse Mural Sketch

I WAS LOOKING through my 1972 student diary recently (see Student Days) and was reminded that on 4 October that year, at the start of my first full month at college I drew:

‘ . . . a sketch from imagination of the proposed identification chart which I thought that I might do as a large painting – in emulsion of course!’

This ‘identification chart’, which grew into an 8ft x 4ft acrylic on chipboard mural, absorbed a lot of my time for the next three years and I was still adding details to it – I think the last thing that I painted was a leopard frog in the foreground – on the eve of the degree show.

To demonstrate the process that I’d gone through, I included the original sketch in my show but I was surprised when a fellow student – a young man from the jewellery department who would go on to make a name for himself as a goldsmith – asked if it was for sale.

Detail from the finished acrylic on chipboard painting

I was taken aback by this and explained that, as a working drawing, it was never intended to be for sale. It’s on the cheap smooth offset paper that they sold at the college shop, folded down the middle and on the back there are streaks where I’ve cleaned my brush, ring-marks from a coffee cup but at one end there are some delightful sketches of frogs in ballpoint pen, drawn by my tutor John Norris Wood when he was advising me to add some reptiles and amphibians to the painting.

I’ve just come across the sketch in a drawer in the plan chest and I can now see why my college friend was attracted to it. It’s rough and splodgy but there’s spontaneity about it that is inevitably missing in the laboriously crafted finished product.

Equine Delinquents

EARLIER THIS week at 6.30 in the morning we heard galloping hooves going down the lane and thought someone had got up early for a ride. At breakfast-time we saw that it was the three ponies from the field behind us that had escaped. They were escorted back up the lane with a police video van bringing up the rear.

The owners soon identified the weak point in the fence; a small gate to a service area. They sat on guard there drinking cups of coffee until repairs could be made. Later I could see from the hoof prints that the ponies got at least as far as the main road, making their way along the pavement and into the ends of driveways as they went.

Next door’s Sumac is now in flower and attracting hoverflies and bees. It’s a tree that doesn’t seem quite in step with the seasons.

Frog Trap

This morning I was upset to be unable to save a frog. It had become trapped in a drain at the edge of the road in front of Barbara’s mum’s house (which is currently up for sale). I found a pair of rubber gloves and a small bucket. Not ideal for the job, but what completely stumped me was that, without a crowbar to hand, I couldn’t use the lever point to flip open the grating. By then the frog had disappeared into the opaque black water in the sump.

Inky Feet

After drawing my slippers yesterday I thought I should try drawing my feet but I think I prefer drawing hands. The proportions are more familiar.