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.
The confrontation between Charles Waterton and Edward Thornhill Simpson the soap manufacturer is rather wordy. It wasn’t until I printed a paper copy at the final size that I could see that the font was larger than it needed to be.
In this frame I’ve dropped a scan my pen and watercolour into a layout that I’ve set up in the comic strip creation program Manga Studio EX5.
Although in this second version the type looks rather small on screen, it is still a bit larger than is necessary to make it legible in print but it’s small enough to give a bit of breathing space around the speech bubbles.
Waterton in Watercolour
I saved the first image in RGB (red, green, blue) format, the recommended method for viewing on screen, the second in CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) which supposedly gives the best results when printing but I prefer the colour cast of RGB, even on the printed version from my colour laser. Neither version manages to capture the transparency of the original watercolour artwork. A professional printer will, I’m sure, make a better job of it.
The typeface is Hannotate SC Regular, set in a italics in the second version. I might hand letter the final version but for the moment this is a useful way of setting up the design of each frame of the comic strip. There might be a few tweaks to script and it will be easier to accommodate those if I don’t commit to hand written text at this stage.
At last, I’m getting started on the final artwork for the Charles Waterton comic strip project. I’m starting with the confrontation between Waterton and Mr Simpson the soap manufacturer, whose factory in Walton village has polluted air and stream and killed trees in the Waterton’s park.
Did the soap works look anything like the scene I imagined in my rough? I’ve been unable to track down a photograph of the factory as it was, so using a map in Peter Wright’s 1985 book A History of Walton I made a 3D model in Sketchup.
The factory was built on a triangle of land between the Barnsley Canal and Shay Lane. Shay Lane runs eastwards out of the village towards Crofton. I tried to use the satellite image from Google Earth as my starting point but that got a bit fiddly as I’m not familiar with the program so I started with a blank and drew out the buildings on the ground plane by eye, then I extruded them up into 3D objects using the Push Pull Tool.
With the two chimneys this isn’t so very different to the scene I conjured up from imagination but it’s not quite what I need for the showdown scene, so I’ll take the essential features from it and bring them together to make it a bit more dramatic.
A photograph taken after the factory closed shows that the canal ran past the soap works on an embankment, so the barges were passing by at roof level.
‘Mr Darwin Welcome. Delighted you have come to Yorkshire’ is the opening caption, spoken by Charles Waterton from the top branches of an elm tree to Darwin, then in his mid-thirties, midway between the voyage of The Beagle and the publication of The Origin of Species.
It’s a complex double-page spread but you’ve got to start somewhere so this very rough rough suggests how we can slot in the main aspects of a tour of Waterton’s sanctuary for wildlife at Walton Park. You could really extend this one tour into a twelve page comic story in its own right but that’s all the space we have for the last forty years of Waterton’s life.
I would so like to have heard a discussion between Darwin and Waterton about the Nondescript, Waterton’s enigmatic ape-man creation. Did it give Darwin the idea for his Descent of Man?!
And here’s another Darwin/Waterton which regrettably we’re unable to follow up in this brief comic strip biography. Here’s Darwin recalling his medical student days in Edinburgh;
‘I heard Audubon deliver some interesting discourses on the habits of North American birds, sneering somewhat unjustly at Waterton. By the way, a negro lived in Edinburgh, who had travelled with Waterton and gained his livelihood by stuffing birds, which he did excellently; he gave me lessons for payments, and I used often to go sit with him for he was a very pleasant and intelligent man.’
Charles Darwin, Autobiography
Charles Darwin, drawn for a student project in 1975 on the graphic design course at Leeds College of Art.
Also in Darwin’s autobiography there’s a passage which echoes Charles Waterton’s childhood. Darwin recalls; ‘To my deep mortification my father once said to me “You care for nothing but, shooting, dogs and rat catching and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.”‘
At last, I’ve had a look through the script for the Charles Waterton comic and I’m onto the first pencil roughs stage, quickly going through the scenes doing what in the theatre would be called blocking in; planning the movement of characters. Even with something as chaotic as a punch-up with poachers I don’t want to keep changing the point of view too much so that, for instance, the character on the left is inexplicably on the right in the next frame. Based on a true incident recalled by Charles Waterton, this near fatal fracas ends up with a touch of Laurel and Hardy slapstick because, Waterton tells us, the poacher ran away with his hat and he ended up with the poacher’s.
Despite having read the Dummies book and watching several video tutorials, I’m still struggling to get up to speed with Manga Studio EX4 but at least it is easy to draw up the panels to see how much action I need to fit onto each page. I might very well draw the panels by hand in the final artwork, I haven’t decided on that yet, but at this stage I’m happy to have a grid to work in. Obviously I wouldn’t go for such thick ruled borders alongside my pen and ink drawings.
I can see the advantage of getting friends in to choreograph the fight and take reference photographs but at the moment fast pencil sketches, getting the gist of the action, are all that I need.
I was beginning to think that I’d been a bit indulgent, suggesting that our next meeting to discuss the Waterton Comic should be at Walton Hall, home of Charles Waterton, but, when I drove over the bridge and through the old park gateway, as the panorama of lake, hall and copses opened up, I realised that this was going to be more inspiring than a conference room at Wakefield One.
It’s only today that I received my new drawing pen, a Lamy Safari with an extra fine nib, but already I feel that it’s going to be my favourite. John Welding, who is illustrating the opening segment of the Waterton Comic, photographed me starting my first sketch with the new pen, appropriately of the place where I first opened my eyes; Walton Hall was an annexe of Manygates maternity hospital in the baby boom years. No wonder I feel so attached to the place.
As I call to pick up Barbara from the Rickaro bookshop in Horbury (for the last time as she retires today!), I try out the pen again by drawing Tilly the bookshop’s Welsh collie and a couple of architectural details across the road.
I ordered pen with a filler so that I could use Noodler’s ink in it and I’m pleased that it proves waterproof when I add the watercolour wash to my sketch.
It’s unusual for me to work in pencil but it’s the quickest way to produce so many drawings. I abandoned the tonal conte crayon shading after the first couple of frames. The Faber Castell eraser doubles as a cap for the HB pencil and proved useful, as it’s so much quicker than diving into the drawer for my regular eraser.
I recently read Guiseppe Cristiano’s Storyboard Design Course, so I’m keen to organise my ideas for my latest freelance job, a comic strip, in storyboard form. My work usually starts with a drawing in a sketchbook, or with days, weeks, months, sometimes years of research but I’ve got a midsummer deadline to work to for this job, so that isn’t an option. The starting point here has to be a story that works.
John Whitaker, curator at Wakefield Museums, is providing the script for this 36 page comic strip to mark the 150th anniversary of traveller and naturalist Charles Waterton. I’m working on Part 3, The Defence of Natural History which tells the story of the nature reserve that Waterton set up at Walton Park, near Wakefield, when his exploring came to an end in the 1830s.
I’ve split John’s initial outline for the story into 33 frames. After a dramatic opening in which Waterton fights hand to hand with poachers, there’s a tour of the nature reserve. This doesn’t give me much of a chance for storytelling. Waterton simply takes us around his park like a presenter on Countryfile.
We might try introducing a character being taken on a tour of the estate just to create a bit of dialogue and tension. Charles Darwin was a visitor who admired Waterton but could also be rather scathing of Waterton’s views and eccentricities. Another possibility is that Waterton’s son Edmund could be the one being dragged around the estate. Edmund was, like so many children, a polar opposite to his father.
In The Storyboard Design Course, one of the artists says that he never starts his storyboard at frame one. He’d rather go straight in to the confrontation with the villain of the piece. In my case that’s ‘Soapy’ Simpson, whose factory polluted the stream in Waterton’s park and killed the trees in his heronry.
I found myself snarling as I drew Simpson and thinking of the kind of confrontation that Clint Eastwood has with a smug but dangerous villain – Lee Van Cleef rather than Eli Wallach – in the Fistful of Dollars trilogy.
The other scene that comes alive for me is the one of Waterton’s sisters-in-law, the Miss Edmonstones being racially abused in Wakefield. They were Arawak on their mother’s side, Scottish on their father’s so you feel that at that time they must have appeared quite exotic in the old market town. But so far we’ve got no definite evidence that this actually happened, just the odd hint that John Whitaker is following up with some additional research.
I’d like to feature the Miss Edmonstones as a contrast to the all-action adventures of Waterton. There’s often a woman (or in one case ‘the Woman’) in a Sherlock Holmes story to provide a contrast to the male world of Holmes and Watson.
Here’s a Waterton comic strip that I produced in the 1980s for a Wakefield Naturalist’s Society display at the Wakefield Flower Show.
Link;The Storyboard Design Course; The Ultimate Guide for Artists, Directors, Producers and Scriptwriters by Guiseppe Cristiano, published by Thames & Hudson
A preview of my article for the next edition of Coxley News. The Parish of Sitlington, south-west of Wakefield, includes Netherton, Middlestown and Overton.
The Dog Stone
Also known as the Stocks Stone, can be found on a corner east of the church at Netherton. Did the village stocks once stand here? Its worn upper surface suggests that it might have been used as a mounting block.
Turnpike Road Milestone
Now preserved near Lady Ings Farm on Low Lane, Middlestown, my guess is that it must originally have stood at the junction of Low Lane and New Road, on the left as you climb Middlestown Hill, because the inscription on the other side is ‘TO Huddersfd 9 Miles’.
New Road dates from the early 1840s and was a turnpike, replacing an earlier turnpike route along Sandy Lane which had been approved by an Act of Parliament in 1759.
The toll bars were removed in 1882.
Coxley Quarry Stone
This carved stone, downstream from Coxley Dam was, so I’m told, carved by a man who lived in one of the cottages at the bottom of Coxley Lane. He had time on his hands because, like so many in the 1930s, he was out of work. He once rescued a boy from Coxley Dam.
Was this outbuilding at the Ship Inn at ‘the Brig’ (Horbury Bridge), a barn or a stables? As there is a pulley to the left of the upper door/hatch could it have been a warehouse? Perhaps it was connected with the woollen or rag trade?
The lean-to, if we can judge by that matching window, appears to be part of the original building but the extension at the back looks like a later addition.
Twenty or thirty years ago the upper storey was used as a loft for fantail pigeons. The entrance hatch and landing platform are still there in the middle of the upper door.
As I said the other day, there’s supposed to be a unique ladder or staircase inside but, from this side of the surrounding fence, I haven’t been able to spot it as the demolition continues.
I can see that the inner wall is modern-looking brick, the roof timbers sawn timber, so it is probably early twentieth century rather than early Victorian or Georgian. We can be sure that the stone-built, flag-roofed Ship Inn is at least 150 years old because it gets a mention (an unfavourable mention!) in Baring-Gould’s account of Horbury Bridge in 1864.
Middups and Shippon
What a shame that they’re demolishing this building that has been part of the townscape for so long. This was originally the rear of the inn, as you can see in the map below. The present main Wakefield to Huddersfield road through Horbury Bridge dates from the mid-twentieth century.
The field behind the Ship Inn was known as the Middups. Perhaps, like the place name Midhope this meant a secluded field in the middle of a valley.
It was in this field that local weaver and talented musician David Turton calmed a bellowing bull by tuning up his bass viol and playing a chorus from Handel.
The Ship sounds a likely name for an inn next to an inland waterway but alternatively it might refer to a shippon or cow shed.
Horbury Bridge 1906
Ordnance Survey map of Horbury Bridge in 1906 superimposed on an Apple Maps aerial view. The old ‘barn’ marked in yellow.Horbury Bridge, Ordnance Survey 1906
My thanks to Paul Spencer who pointed out, via Twitter, that there was a blacksmith’s close to the old ‘barn’. He sent me a copy of the Ordnance Survey map of Horbury Bridge for 1906 which I’ve superimposed on a present day aerial view. The ‘barn’, which I’ve highlighted in yellow, isn’t shown on the 1906 map but its footprint doesn’t overlap the older building – long demolished – immediately to the north, so it could be a century old.
Aerial view from the Apple Maps app. Note the new road which dates from the mid-twentieth century.
I’ve always wondered exactly how the Old Cut, abandoned and filled in during the twentieth century, fitted in to the layout of the Brig.
The river bridge of the early twentieth century was narrower than the modern version and crossed the river at a slightly different alignment.
Link; Account by Baring-Gould ofthe story of David Turton and the bull. This doesn’t mention that this took place in the field known as the Middups. My source for that was Horbury man Bernard Larrad, born (c. 1895-1980), who also told me that he had a photograph of himself as a baby sitting on Baring-Gould’s knee. Why he was so honoured wasn’t explained. As far as I remember, Bernard didn’t claim to be related to Baring-Gould.
These three fragments of pottery which we found while digging the lower veg bed must date from well before our house was built in the late 1930s. Perhaps they were mixed in with a wagonload of night-soil (contents of a privy) that was dumped on the field in Victorian times.
Cross section of edge of a blue and white platter?
The blue and white design was the first to catch my eye. It was only when I took a macro photograph of the crazed white potshard that I spotted that it too has spots of blue glaze on it. A cross section reveals that both shards are made of the same kind of clay and are the same thickness. Both are very slightly curved so I think these are both pieces of a semi-rectangular, tray-like platter.
The earthenware has an almost imperceptible curve on it too. Perhaps it was part of a large jar or bottle.
A view of the cross-section appears to show that it was made of two distinct layers of clay but in close-up you can see that the outer, darker layer fades towards the lighter inner layer. Is this an differential effect due to the way it was fired in the kiln?
It appears to have a light grey glaze on its outer surface. Perhaps it was slip-coated.
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.
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.
The other scene that comes alive for me is the one of Waterton’s sisters-in-law, the Miss Edmonstones being racially abused in Wakefield. They were Arawak on their mother’s side, Scottish on their father’s so you feel that at that time they must have appeared quite exotic in the old market town. But so far we’ve got no definite evidence that this actually happened, just the odd hint that John Whitaker is following up with some additional research.
The Dog Stone
Coxley Quarry Stone
