I’ve added the lettering to my opening title frame, which brings things together. I can decide later whether I want to stick with these colours and whether I want to introduce hand-lettering for the captions. As the script has yet to take on its final form, it would be wise for now to stick with a computer generated font for the speech bubbles.
Category: Art
Watercolour Ripples
I sometimes get the feeling that, rather than drawing a comic strip, I’m acting as production designer and storyboard artist for a big budget movie of The Life of Charles Waterton.
I’ve been watching period dramas such as Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, which is set in the same period and was filmed in Yorkshire on locations that included two Georgian streets in Wakefield which Waterton would have known.
The BBC Films 2012 version of Great Expectations included costumes and scenes that would have been perfect for my comic strip. At the climax of the film there’s a scene on the Thames which had me thinking about the dawn procession of boats across Walton Lake which was arranged for Waterton’s funeral.
In today’s illustration – a premonition of Waterton’s funeral – I tried to suggest dawn light on eddies in the water. The gradation of watercolour from lemon yellow to indigo called for some forward planning. My Winsor & Newton watercolour box didn’t have enough divisions in the palette for all the colours, so I moved on to another box for the French ultramarine and indigo.
Cross-hatched Headline
With so many drawings to do, it might seem counterproductive to lavish a few hours on the title for my comic strip, which I could have added in minutes in Photoshop or Manga Studio but it helps me establish the mood of the story. I’ll probably modify it later but this will suffice to set the scene.
The inspiration for the blocky lettering comes from the Channel 4 series Amazing Spaces Shed of the Year. Their freehand, cross-hatched logo suggests the blockiness of a shed and its homespun design. I’m going for a Victorian feel in my illustrations, so why shouldn’t I try cross-hatching my lettering.
I was also thinking about the posters that Waterton had printed for his campaign to save the last open spaces available to the people of Wakefield.
The starting point for my title was a typeface called Superclarendon Bold, which I’ve squared up as a visual metaphor for the wall that Waterton built around his nature reserve in a heroic attempt to save it from poachers and pollution.
We’ve discussed using a font or handlettering based on Charles Waterton’s handwriting throughout the comic but I think that would give the story an elegant period flavour, introducing a hint of Jane Austen. I’m aiming at something more robust and chunky.
Like so many of us from the West Riding of Yorkshire, Waterton liked to spend his holidays at Scarborough.
Polishing up those Roughs
As so often happens, I feel this rough drawing of Charles Waterton for the comic project is more lively than my finished, cross-hatched illustrations. I hope that I can bring a bit of this freedom into my finished work.
When I think of roughs I think of layout paper, pencil and shorthand sketches but it’s a big jump from those to the final artwork. You can easily lose the initial spontaneity.
At college our tutor Quentin Blake said that he preferred to get away from pencil on layout paper roughs as soon as possible and start working on whatever paper and in whatever medium he was going to use for the final artwork.
In two revised roughs for my poachers page, I decided to draw in pen and watercolour so that I can drop scans of these roughs into the almost finished page. It gives me and my writer a much better idea of how the finished page might look.
As you can see from the drawing of the park gates, layout paper soon cockles under a watercolour wash, so I might start using cartridge paper for this kind of halfway to finished rough.
I often find myself thinking of my comic strip when I draw from life, for instance the lime trees foliage today had me thinking of how I might make the backgrounds to the scenes in Waterton’s park look convincing but not overworked.
The Poachers’ Panels
You can’t see how the page will work until you drop the artwork into the comic strip panels and add the speech bubbles. But there isn’t a lot of dialogue on this action-packed page.
The layout still needs some attention. The central circular panel needs to be larger and I’d like the knife to be breaking out of the panel but for now this version will serve as a rough cut.
The main lessons that I draw from working on this fight sequence are;
- Be bold
- Be relaxed
- Learn a bit more about Manga Studio (the program I use to add the borders)
Fruit Bowl
Tomatoes are fruits, so I’m calling this a fruit bowl. I’m trying out the loose version of Victorian cross-hatching that I’m intending to use for the Waterton comic.
I’m missing getting out to draw natural history. I’m glad that at this time last year I kept taking advantage of every free day to draw orchids, waders and reed-beds at the RSPB Old Moor reserve. But on Friday I did get half an hour, between other commitments, to sit and draw a branch of cotoneaster. The sketch of the girl with the ribbon in her hair is from a oil on canvas portrait of my mother, painted c. 1924.
We grabbed a late lunch at the Caffe Capri on Friday, giving me a chance to draw a beech tree on Horbury High Street. The tree seems to be is suffering from being almost totally tarmacked in as the ends of many of its twigs are devoid of leaves but we’ve had a cool, dry June so perhaps in a milder, damper summer it would recover.
Poachers in Colour
I finished adding cross-hatching to the last of the battle with the poachers panels this morning and I’ve spent the afternoon adding colour.
What 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.
For 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.
I 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.
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.
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.
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.
This 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
Black 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’.
It’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
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.
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
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
Thanks 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.
Working 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.
I’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
I’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.
Having 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.