Last week I was struggling to use my perspex drawing board as a lightbox in the bright sunlight even with the studio blind down and I had to resort to tracing from my rough to watercolour paper on the back bedroom window. This Huion A4 LED light pad, delivered today, is a great improvement.
Working in the confines of a single panel I find that I tend to squeeze my figures in. When I look at them I feel that the proportion isn’t quite right. They look like figures trying to squeeze into a lift but with such a cropped view it’s difficult to see what’s going wrong.
With the light pad I can transfer from a problem figure on the watercolour paper to a sheet of layout paper then work out the pose including the parts of the figure that fall outside the boundary of the frame.
The layout paper then goes under the watercolour paper and I can pencil in, then ink in, the improved version of the figure.
My rough and detail from George Walker’s illustration, 1814, the dog handler holding back the hounds in a hunt in open country with hawks.
Sometimes I come across the perfect source of reference. In this first frame of my comic strip version of the fight between Waterton and the poachers in Walton Park I drew the astonished poacher realising that he’d been tricked by Waterton into firing at a wooden decoy pheasant. Googling for images of Yorkshire workers and countrymen in the early Victorian period, I came across George Walker’s Costume of Yorkshire, a book that I’ve used in my research on several previous occasions.
It’s hard to believe, seeing the two of them together (above), but I drew the rough before I stumbled across the Walker illustration. It’s so similar, with the exception of those lapels, that I have to wonder whether the image was lingering in my mind from when I last browsed through the book. Probably not, but this is the archetypal image that I have of an early Victorian countryman.
My scene takes place in 1835 and Walker published his book in 1814, but I think that country workers and their poacher rivals would be fairly conservative in their dress at that time.
For the other poacher, in my rough I’d gone for a powerful looking man with mutton chop whiskers and therefore too similar to the villain from the soap works scene, Edward Thornhill Simpson.
Again, George Walker comes to the rescue. His moor guide (left) will be my model for the other poacher.
Walker’s drawings were kept for many years at Walton Hall in the collection of Edward Hailstone. In the introduction to a new edition of Costume of Yorkshire, written at Walton Hall in the Easter 1885, Hailstone writes;
‘like his intimate friend Mr. Waterton of Walton Hall, [Walker]would constantly be out at early dawn in the summer months, to watch the habits of the feathered race.’
One further link; Hailstone rented Walton Hall on a long term lease from the soap manufacturing Simpson family, who had bought the property from Waterton’s son Edmund.
Forty years ago today was my last day at college. Here I am with the painting of birds in the Royal College of Art greenhouse, that I’d started three years earlier and which I thought might be a six week job . . .
I find pencil roughs the quickest way to develop my ideas. I’ve got a wonderful program, Manga Studio, which can easily handle this process but pencil, eraser and the occasional spot of Tipp-Ex correction fluid makes for a more hands on, tactile way of working.
Referring back to the script, I’m going through the basic outline of my first storyboard-style roughs, trying to add drama, clarity and a more interesting layout.
We’ve had a little round of appointments to catch up with over the last couple of days, not just the dentist’s and doctor’s, where I made the two sketches in the waiting rooms, but also the opticians where I had a fitting for my new glasses (same frames but with new high tech varifocal 100% UV proof lenses) so we deserved a lunch break at the Seed Room, where I drew the view looking north over Smithy Brook Valley and Thornhill Edge.
I keep imagining that I’m producing a stage play. Mr Simpson is really getting into his character as the villain of the piece, all sneers and sarcasm, but, as an illustrator I’m responsible for the bit part players too; fo their costume, make-up, even their back story, as far as it goes.
I can imagine the extra playing the labourer saying to me ‘What’s my motivation in this scene?’
‘Er . . . could you lean on your shovel and smirk, as if you’re thinking “this should be fun”?’
I’ve learnt a lot about the strategy of producing a comic strip while working on this page. For instance, for those first two panels (which were the last to be completed) I drew them both first and then coloured them together, to save mixing the colours twice.
I realise that a decisive style is going to work best, rather than the soft tentative approach that I use for natural history subjects. Plenty of structure and drama is what’s needed in a comic strip.
Whatever my misgivings about this page, I’m now leaving it until I’ve finished the other eleven pages, then I can come back to it and review it. Hopefully I will feel that it still works in the context of the story.
How do I stop WordPress Compressing my Files?
Setting compression to 100% in the Media settings in WordPress. But it still compresses to 90%!So how come this image is so sharp? It’s a PNG and WordPress doesn’t ‘help’ you save bandwidth by compressing them.
Having gone to so much trouble, I’m keen that my work comes over as crisply as possible in this blog, allowing for the inevitable loss of sharpness that you’re always going to get between the paper version and the onscreen image. I’ve added a plugin to stop my web page program WordPress compressing my JPGs (which it does in order to save bandwidth) as this is what makes them lose sharpness.
Yes, I know that it’s a marginal loss of sharpness, but I’m an illustrator. We worry about such things!
Unfortunately the plugin that I’m using, WP Resized Image Quality, hasn’t been tested on the latest version of WordPress and, would you believe it, my JPGs, which I’ve already tweaked to perfection in Photoshop, are still getting compressed.
By the way, I checked with Christine Rondeau who designed Mon Cahier, the theme that I use for my WordPress posts, and she tells me the compression definitely isn’t happening there.
It’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.
I’ve been looking forward to seeing this drawing in colour. It looks rather stagey but it tells the story clearly, so I’ll stick with this version.
This is the first time that I’ve added a curved tail to a speech balloon. In Manga Studio EX5 this kind of tail is known as a spline. Mathematically, a spline curve is one that moves through a given series of points. Because of lack of headroom in this frame, a straight tail would have to emerge from the side of the balloon, which would look rather awkward.
No wonder Simpson looks so pleased with himself, he’s the first character to get a spline bubble in this comic strip. I don’t blame Waterton for storming off indignantly.
I’ve left the background muted because I can easily add more colour if it’s needed but, as it’s transparent watercolour, I can’t remove it if I overdo it.
Edward 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.
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 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.
With 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.
Last week I was struggling to use my perspex drawing board as a lightbox in the bright sunlight even with the studio blind down and I had to resort to tracing from my rough to watercolour paper on the back bedroom window. This Huion A4 LED light pad, delivered today, is a great improvement.
Working in the confines of a single panel I find that I tend to squeeze my figures in. When I look at them I feel that the proportion isn’t quite right. They look like figures trying to squeeze into a lift but with such a cropped view it’s difficult to see what’s going wrong.
The layout paper then goes under the watercolour paper and I can pencil in, then ink in, the improved version of the figure.
