I CAN’T get my wooden lay figure into the dramatic pose that I’m trying to set up for my latest Drawing Words & Writing Pictures tutorial. Every time that I move its arms and legs into the acute angles that I need they spring back to a right angle.
Category: Art
Jack
MY NEXT assignment in my cartoon course is to produce a comic strip layout for Jack & Jill. When we took a coffee break on our shopping trip to Outlet Village a man came repeatedly to the water feature in the precinct to fetch a pail of water. The little waterfall at the bottom of the chute is so shallow that he could get only a couple of inches in his bucket on each trip.
I think that Jack in the nursery rhyme has to be a boy as he’s paired with Jill who I always take to be his sister but perhaps there’s something about the workman and his setting that I can use in my comic strip.
Jack and Jill
Here’s my take on the nursery rhyme, inspired by the workman and the water feature and, taking a cue from the baseball hat, going for a location on a dustbowl stricken American farm.
This exercise is to take the story to the thumbnail stage only, so excuse the rudimentary sketches. The subtleties would come later, but I guess that this is as far as we’re intended to take it. As you’ll know if you’ve read previous posts, I’m following the course in Jessica Abel & Matt Madden’s book Drawing Words & Writing Pictures.
This exercise is about different kinds of transition, seven of them in total; the light bulb, for example, is a rather cliched symbollic transition to represent a bright idea.
Page two starts with a scene-to-scene transition. Different location, different time of day;
Not only a change of scene but we seem to have moved into a Mad Max post-apocalyptical world.
I should explain that the last frame represents my attempt at that almost impossible transition, the non-sequitur. Almost impossible because as readers we’ll always try and invent our own stories to link two random frames, no matter how unrelated they are.
As soon as I drew Humpty Dumpty, I realised that he has a very obvious connection with fellow nursery rhyme characters Jack & Jill, but as he’s a poster boy for nonsense and paradox (he even gets a mention in Finnegan’s Wake), I want to keep him in there.
In fact, having got a taste for telling stories, something I very rarely attempt, I now want to know why he’s talking to someone about asparagus. I’ve got a theory.
Chairs, Dog and Baby
My sketchbook pages for the past couple of days include sketches of my brother’s Welsh springer spaniel.
One month old and not as active as Frank but difficult to draw in perspective. His face is proportionately small in comparison to the size of his head.
Frank getting rather silly. Too active to draw any detail.
Frank waiting for the next game.
Frank, my brother’s energetic one-year old springer spaniel.
Armchairs are slightly more drawing friendly as they’re usually simple shapes, comfortably saggy or plumped up, and solid, so you don’t have the network of negative shapes to deal with.
Chairs are always a bit of a challenge for me. The legs have to be the right length, so that they touch the floor in a reasonably convincing perspective. I find myself double-checking by looking at each negative shape; the spaces between legs, arms and supporting struts.
The Pheasants are Revolting
IF YOU START working out your ideas for a comic strip with thumbnails (quick pencil roughs) you can check that all the elements of the story – words, pictures, the way they break up into panels – fit together coherently before committing yourself to anything approaching final artwork.
This exercise from Drawing Words & Writing Pictures calls for you to create your own characters, perhaps taking inspiration from staple characters of long-running comic strips such as a married couple, a group of children or talking animals.
I looked out of the window for inspiration but Biscuit the Welsh pony in the meadow wouldn’t work because he’s always on his own. Barbara suggested that the characters with most comic potential in our garden are the pheasants. Her favourite is the female who stands under the bird table pecking fallen sunflower hearts from the edge of the patio, as if she’s sitting at a desk.
The male struts about pompously, so you assume that he’s always heading for an undignified fall.
With my first quick draft I realised that I didn’t need the ‘desk’; amusing as it is, it plays no part in the story. To present the dialogue in the correct order I needed to move the female to the right.
Ash and Bramble
THIS IS the kind of building that I find myself drawing when I doodle; a series of triangles, semi-circles and rectangles. I like those interlocking roofs. The tower has a compact sturdiness, like a pepper-pot or a chess-piece.
The clump of ash saplings and one or two shoots of bramble (top), growing in a courtyard amongst buildings is the kind of subject that Frederick Franck often drew in his Zen of Seeing books. Unlike the building, you can’t simplify this tangle of vegetation into geometric shapes, you’ve just got to let yourself go and hope that the rhythms that run through the clump will appear in your drawing.
A man-made object such as a fence-post or old wall would give some definition and contrast but all that I had available was the grid of the paving slabs.
Different Planet
I’M BACK exploring the final frontier; comic strips. Here’s the next panel in the little story that I’m illustrating as part of the Drawing Words & Writing Pictures course.
My first attempt had the astronaut planting the flag but for him to do this with his right hand was awkward, if I wanted to keep the left to right action that runs through a western comic strip (it goes the opposite way in Japanese Manga comics).
Hopefully the implication is that he has just planted it himself, rather than discovered an existing flag on the moon he’s just landed on.
It’s tricky explaining a sequence of events in just one panel, but I can now move on to the end of the story. These last two panels show his return being greeted with much fanfare and his realisation that he’s landed on the wrong planet.
Sat-nav
The next part of the exercise is to add some extra panels and gags. The first thing that occurred to me was to cover the abrupt jump from moon to alien planet so here’s the lunar module heading back on its return journey.
How does the astronaut become lost in space? It’s got to be his sat-nav that’s faulty. Uttoxeter was the first town to mind when I thought of sat-nav, so Utopia sounded like a suitable name for an alien planet. Taunton and Titan might just work or Mars and Marsden . . .
No, it could only be Uttoxeter. That ‘x’ in the middle makes it sound suitably alien. Or wrong.
Just to tie things up I include a frame to show touch-down on the wrong planet.
Here’s the new, extended sequence;
Seeing all eight panels together really gives the impression that this is some kind of a story.
So my truncated new story could start with the sat-nav problem and end with meeting the aliens. Not very funny but at least it has a beginning a middle and an end. I have much to learn.
Blast Off!
‘WE HAVE ignition!’ . . .
I’ve been eager to get back to my Drawing Words & Writing Pictures tutorials but other commitments intervened however here I am with a – shh!, don’t tell anybody – free weekend so I’m resuming with the chapter 3 tutorial The wrong planet, an activity devised by Pahl Hluchan.
I’m starting by illustrating their suggested five panel story. Each panel is drawn on a 3 x 3 inch square of cartridge paper to which I’ll add extra panels to pad out the action and extra gags if I can think of any, then subtract panels to see how few panels my extended story can be whittled down to.
Post-it Panels
A three inch square of cartridge is a fiddly piece of paper to draw on; the tutorial recommends using post-it notes which sounds a better idea as they’d stay put as you work on them, but I hadn’t got any, so I’ve cut down some 120 gsm Canson cartridge which is a pleasanter surface to work on than the scrap paper that I usually grab for tutorials.
The panels need to be separate for the editing process. This is intended to be a group exercise where you’d mix and match each other’s artwork, sticking the post-it notes on the wall, but I’m going for the one-man version, for the kind of student that the authors refer to as a Ronin, a Ronin being, as I mentioned back in the summer, a freelance samurai who wandered around feudal Japan, or, in my case, a wilfully reclusive freelance illustrator enjoying being holed up in his studio for the weekend (shortly after I wrote that Barbara and I had to pop out with an urgent book order!).
Lamy Safari
I’m using my Lamy Safari fountain pen which is my current favourite for writing and for relaxed drawing. I’ve been inking in the blacks with a Pentel Brush Pen.
The Safari is filled with a Lamy ink cartridge. I haven’t tried it with waterproof Noodler’s ink.
Link; Drawing Words & Writing Pictures by Jessica Abel and Matt Madden
The Pocket Book
IT’S BEEN a while since I looked back through the pages of the pocket-sized sketchbook that goes in the passport wallet that I attach to my belt when we’re walking.
Next to this sketch of the lake at Newmillerdam, drawn almost a month ago, I’ve written:
‘Waterside Kitchen
looking south. Temp. 17
but with cool breeze & grey
skies it feels like September
10.45am 27/8/12
When September proper came along Barbara drove as we headed for Langsett, giving me the opportunity to draw the trees and hills. We were following small winding roads so they look as if they’ve been drawn by a seismograph. The chair and the sausage-loving labrador were in the Bank View cafe after our walk.
We came back via the Flouch Inn, a famous old pub which now has a new identity as an Indian restaurant. Returning via Crow Edge, Lane Head, Shepley, Shelley and Emley, we crossed the watershed between the Don and Calder valleys, a plateau of land above 400 metres (over 1300 feet) of pastures and hay meadows divided by drystone walls with small hamlets and isolated farms.
The Dam Inn
A couple of weeks later, on the 17th, I drew the chimneys of the Dam Inn at Newmillerdam from the cafe. It really does look like September now.
We were at Newmillerdam again yesterday and the first person we met was a woman from the village who had just lost a Peregrine falcon. The jesses had just slipped through her hand as it flew off.
‘It could be a hundred miles away now!’ she said in resignation. As the name suggests this falcon is renowned for its peregrinations. We took her phone number just in case we spotted it.
Richard Long at the Hepworth
Today we had a book order from the Hepworth gallery and were able to combine that with lunch in the cafe there, overlooking the Calder and the old canal offices.
After our walk on the moors the other day it was interesting to see Richard Long’s evocation of a walk across Dartmoor. Rather than cram a sketchbook with little drawings as I would, he’d simply arranged twigs in a long rectangle in a modulated pattern that echoes a natural arrangement – not so much pattern that you see it as weaving but enough set up a natural rhythm.
‘Did the artist actually come here and arrange this himself?’ I asked the attendants, ‘or did you have to follow his instructions?’
‘No, he came and arranged them himself.’
You’d hardly think that a gallery in town would be a sympathetic setting for simple natural forms but a surprising feature of the Hepworth is the view of wild(ish) water that punctuates your circuit of the galleries. There are several floor to ceiling views of the weir on the bend of the Calder which, in normal flow as it is today, makes a continuous cadence of curtains of white water cascading to a jacuzzi of foaming lace below.
The thing that unsettles me about Richard Long’s work is the element of a cultural colonialism in it. He’s not content to just visit a desert or a meadow without trampling a line or a spiral in it, then taking the sort of photograph that a Victorian explorer might take of his handiwork.
I know that they say ‘take only pictures, leave only footprints’ but Long takes this to the extreme. With my size thirteen hiking boots I probably do an equal amount of damage to habitats, but it’s not deliberate.
Sketches
IT’S STARTING to spot with rain as I sit on a bench waiting for the bus and sketch Ingham’s Handyman Shop at the bottom end of Queen Street, Horbury. Using a folded scrap of laser printer paper resting on my knee isn’t going to give the best results, but it’s a drawing that I wouldn’t otherwise have done.
It’s been a scrappy week altogether for drawing. This sketch of Tilly the bookshop border collie was drawn with a Q-Connect Fineliner, a 0.4mm fibre tip pen which is designed to give you 1,800 metres of writing, ruling or stencilling.
It isn’t 100% waterproof, so I tend to use other pens, but it works well enough for quick sketches as it flows so freely, at least it does until the tip gets worn down, which happens long before it reaches the 1,800 metre mark the way I use it.
I inadvertently scanned this lightning sketch of Tilly (below) curling around in her grooming routine at a higher resolution than I intended but I like the way you can see the variety in the lines when you see it at this scale, about four times the original size:
Like all my drawings this week, it’s a bit on the scrappy side but as Tilly was moving so continuously during her grooming session there wasn’t an option for a measured drawing.
I can see that I’ve reverted to a kind of scribbly nonsense writing to represent her curly black hair on her back. You could almost read it as ‘lattélllls’.
And we have had a lot of lattés this week. After so many pen sketches, this morning at the Waterside Kitchen at Newmillerdam as we waited for our lattés I went straight into watercolour – no initial drawing, not even in pencil – sky first then, after letting that dry, the trees.
Summer Afternoon
I’VE BEEN using my Lamy Safari fountain pen a lot recently but this afternoon on our walk around Newmillerdam I’ve just got my passport-sized pouch attached to my belt (I realise that’s more comfortable than having it swinging around my neck like a camera case) so, for this chimney drawn from a table at the Lakeside Kitchen, that means that I’m back to my brown 08 Pilot Drawing Pen, 
which has the advantage that I can add watercolour without the ink running.
The pocket-sized Hahnemuehle travel booklet that I keep in the pouch has more absorbent ‘sketch paper’ than my other sketchbooks; fountain pen tends to bleed but the Drawing Pen works fine. As you can see, it doesn’t flow like the fountain pen in the drawing of Horbury High Street.
It’s a change for me to apply watercolour that immediately soaks in, rather than staying on the surface just a little, as it does on the fairly smooth cartridge paper that I normally use. The off white, creamy coloured paper makes a change from white too.