Category: Art

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

Pentel Brush Pen

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.’

Tilly the bookshop border collie is looking a little subdued today (or you might say, well behaved) because his (correction her, sorry Tilly!) master is away for the weekend.

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

Tuesday: The corn on the cob has swollen a little since I last drew this sweet corn in a veg bed in the library garden a week ago.

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

Horbury High Street, drawn when we took my mum to the optician’s for her weekly appointment. Lamy Safari pen.

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.

Lamy Safari pen drawing of sweet corn in Horbury Library’s garden last Tuesday.

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.

Chimney Tops

AS I WAS drawing chimney pots from the waiting room the other day it started to rain so heavily that the small patio, pummeled by the deluge, frothed and bubbled like a shallow Jacuzzi and my view disappeared behind windows that soon became water-features.

I turned my attention to the chair, which someone promptly came and sat in, so he got included as well.

I was drawing this bicycle at the cafe at Newmillerdam on Monday and as it’s owner, Beverley, prepared to whisk it away (that always happens when I start drawing, doesn’t it?!) she came over to chat. She works in stained glass; usually small free-standing panels with lead tracery.

Had I seen the work of her friend Mark Powell? she asked me. He draws detailed character portrait studies in Bic ballpoint pen.

Another of her creative friends, Karron Campbell lives in what appears to be an impossibly scenic corner of New Zealand. Karron and her daughter Rickie left Wakefield four years ago and not surprisingly they don’t seem in any hurry to come back!

I guess the Coromandel Peninsula offers more scenic possibilities than Wakefield’s Rhubarb Triangle.

Links; Mark Powell Biro Pen Drawings, Karron Dawn Campbell’s and her daughter Rickie Louise Hill’s Creative Workshop on MySpace.

There were two voles . . .

BACK TO the exercises in Drawing Words, Writing Pictures and my next assignment is to draw a single panel 5 x 7 inch cartoon then come up with three different captions.

At first my mind went blank and I considered some traditional cartoon scenarios – the desert island etc – but then I decided on two voles, one I imagined with a kind of glazed but thoughtful expression, the other turning to ask it a casually dimissive question.

Hey, look, we’re still in pencil, shouldn’t we be inked by now?

But getting such subtlety of expression proved beyond me. I didn’t want a startled look (above, top) or a dumb ‘oops!’ look (above, lower left) – that vole reminds me a bit of Stan Laurel. With his pointing finger, the questioning vole (above, lower right) looks too much as if he’s giving important advice rather than being dismissive.

I’ve introduced too much drama for the gentle atmosphere of ennui that I had in mind; the vole version of Waiting for Godot.

You’re kidding! – you saw a body coming through the rye?!

In my next attempt the vole on the left looks too stunned while the one on the right should be turning in a peevish way but instead he looks as if he’s preparing to escape some horror. This is the problem with showing a sequence of actions in just one panel; has vole 2 been;

  1. facing to the right and he’s just turned his head back, or
  2. has he been facing to the left and he’s just turned his arms and torso to the right?

With all that unintended action in my rough, I’ve gone for a more dramatic caption.

And what does a vole do with it’s hands? I’ve heard animators say that they’re actors who work with pencils and the same applies to cartoons. Even the insignificant details that no one is going to notice still have to work.

Just think! Exactly which clump of meadow grass did you leave it next to?

The anxious vole and his annoyed companion in this one brought to mind the familiar lost car keys, or lost car in a huge car park situation. What ‘it’ is in the context of the everyday life of the vole, I leave for the reader to decide. A hazelnut perhaps?

But that’s quite enough vole cartoons. The great thing about doing this course is that it’s purely educational and I don’t have to come up with a working solution each time. I can now go forward to the next exercise, something fresh to have fun with.

Usually with these ‘how to’ art books I’m tempted to read through them quickly thinking ‘Oh yes, I’ll remember that advice.’ But there’s nothing like trying it for yourself to really get to grips with the principles and to understand how it all works.

Great Granddad George

I THINK that I could write a short book about this picture. It’s like a time capsule from my family’s past. We’re lucky to have dozens of Victorian photographs but this is my absolute favourite because the others, usually of people in their Sunday best standing sometimes in front of a painted background in a photographer’s studio don’t give us a glimpse of everyday life. It’s the sort of glimpse of normal life that I long for while I’m checking out the bare details of births, deaths and marriages.

He’s a real guy, relaxing at home. How often is this kind of candid shot going to turn up in a family album?

This photograph is just 5.5 x 8.5 cm (2¼ x 3¼ inches) – as you might guess from that gigantic thumb print! I’m going to do a lot of Photoshopping on this photograph to get rid of the dots and streaks.

My great granddad George Swift (1840-1918) has appeared in my Wild West Yorkshire diary before wearing a velvet dress but I should explain he was only a toddler at the time and in the 1840s that’s how they dressed. He worked as a spring knife cutler in Sheffield but as a sideline he and his wife Sarah Ann ran a little grocer’s shop which must explain the Peak Frean’s Biscuit advertisement (a sandwich board to put out when the shop was open?) in front of the kitchen range.

I’m guessing that the watering can on the range is actually a kettle. Those two black shapes behind it look like the iron lids that cover the hot plates on an Aga. Or are they plates or platters? And I think that the cupboard on the left must be the oven of a Yorkshire range, so George is sleeping by the fire.

What was in the rather nice china bowl beside him? Soup . . . porridge? Have you noticed the colanders and what I think is a potato ricer hanging on the wall on the right.

I remember my grandma (on the other side of the family) cutting newspaper for her larder shelves to resemble those lace edges.

I so wish that I could see the whole of the picture in the top left corner. I think that we’re seeing a clenched left hand and a blowsy flower like a camelia or an old-fashioned rose. Is the flower growing from a kind of tiled planter or is that a piece of card that someone has slotted in the corner of the picture for safekeeping.

I would like to think that the picture is of George’s father Samuel Burgin Swift (1813 – 1878). The style is similar to the oil on canvas portrait of George as a toddler that my mum still has. We have no picture of Samuel Burgin, so wouldn’t I love to see that picture! He was a cutler like his son, so is he holding one of the tools of his trade?

 

 

Deep in the Pond

Identifying a water beetle; this one didn’t have an English name.

I’VE HAD my Olympus Tough for a few years and it’s proved as reliable as the name suggests so on a Wakefield Naturalists’ field meeting today, when we were looking at leeches and efts (young newts) in a pond at Potteric Carr, I decided to be brave and reach down into the water to see how it would turn out.

Eft; a young newt

Hidden Depths

Leech, this one was about six inches long at full stretch!

My wildlife photographer friend John Gardner suggested using a flash. I normally prefer natural light but, in the murky depths below the pondweeds, the flash works well.

Leaning out and reaching into the water with one hand I found it difficult to avoid camera shake but at least I know that in principle the camera works underwater. Perhaps a rockpool would make a better subject.

Figures in a Queue

I NOTICED when I was drawing my assignments for Drawing Words, Writing Pictures that when it came to making up a cartoon situation I invariably;

    • imagined male characters
    • gave them very generalised costumes

I realised that I needed to feed my imagination a bit by drawing particular people in the real world so, when we had to call at the doctors, I sat a the back of the waiting room and made some visual notes. I thought that notes on colours might help too as I think that I’ve got a tendency to revert to a habitual, limited palette. There wasn’t time to get out my watercolours and I was using a fountain pen containing water soluble ink so I couldn’t have anyway, so I made brief notes.

It’s great to have a procession of people of different sizes, shapes and sexes, although I would have appreciated a bit more time to build up character. Because of the angle that I was drawing from, the next person joining the queue regularly blocked my view of the person I’d just started drawing.

I realised that the best way to proceed was to assume that I’d have only a few seconds for each character and to draw in the basic shape very quickly, then work up the the drawing if I got did happen to have an unrestricted view for a minute or two.

I feel that fountain pen is the quickest medium for this situation. Fibre tips pens don’t flow quite as freely. Pencil, the way I use it when I’m in a hurry, is too messy.

When the supply of queuers temporarily dried up, I reverted to my old standby; drawing my left hand.