I’ve got there at last with my introductory frame for the Waterton comic and I enjoyed finishing off adding the colour this morning. There are a few things that I’d change if I’d started again but my main consideration is to tell the story as clearly as I can. This packs in the necessary elements. Time to move on to the next frame.
Category: People
The Ragged-Trousered Conservationist
Charles Waterton was a hands-on conservationist so as he set about turning the grounds of his ancestral home, Walton Hall, into the world’s first nature reserve, visitors sometimes assumed that he was a gardener or labourer. In the first frame of my comic strip, a railway surveyor mistakes him for a tramp but when I put the meeting in its location by the Barnsley canal, he looks more like a bargee.
Sitting on the Fence
How do I make him look more like an idle bystander? How would that come across in his body language?
Instead of standing on the towpath making a mock-deferential bow, I try him sitting on the fence. And instead of having him wear a shirt and a waistcoat like a bargee, I give him a battered top hat and a rumpled tailcoat.
Waterton could climb trees with ease right into his 80s but I’m struggling to make him look at ease while sitting on the top rail of a fence. Barbara suggests that no one is going to look comfortable sitting on a fence so why not have him reclining on the canal bank?
Barefoot in the Park
Waterton liked to walk barefoot which helps identify him as a dishevelled tramp-like character but to look down at Waterton’s bare feet as well as up at the tree tops of the park beyond that high defensive wall means that I have to fall back on that old cheat used by illustrators, rubberised perspective. It’s not so much of a cheat though because, if this was a film, which is the way that I keep thinking of it, and this was a panning shot, the perspective would keep changing as the camera tracked across the scene.
Yes, Waterton has ended up looking like Willy Wonka, but I think that this version tells the story more clearly than my first rough. It also leaves plenty of space for the three speech bubbles that we need in the space between the characters.
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)
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.
The Fight with Poachers
I’m acting as fight arranger this morning. As I pencil and then start inking the fight with poachers page I’m ironing out some of the inconsistencies in my roughs, always with clarity in telling the story as my main consideration.
For instance in my first version of the frame in which Waterton forces the poacher to drop the knife, I realised that the knife was falling the wrong way, as if the poacher had been holding it upside down.
Manga Now!
I’ve always been sceptical of those ‘how to draw super-heroes’ books but in drawing this fight scene I can see the need for some kind of a system for getting dynamic figures convincingly onto paper. It’s more like choreography than life drawing. I’ve drawn my hand hundreds of times but always in a relaxed position.
I tried one of Keith Sparrow’s suggestions in Manga Now! and put a small mirror on the desk to check out the outspread hand for the poacher dropping the knife but I couldn’t get my hand into the correct perspective nor could I hold the pose in the twisted outstretched position (too many cups of tea at breakfast time, as usual!) and nor could I effectively sketch it single handed. Another problem is that my fingers are long so my hands don’t have the proportions that I need for my powerfully built poacher character.
I’d struggle in a similar way if I tried to take a photograph my hand so I’m concluding that building up the hand in simple block form (above), another suggestion in Keith Sparrow’s Manga Now!, is going to be the best way for me to get the dynamic hands in this story doing exactly what I want them to.
Link; Keith Sparrow author of Manga Now! How to Draw Action Figures
Feet
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.
Hand Coloured
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.
Customers in Costa
Perhaps because I’ve been rattling off so many storyboard frames for my comic strip project, I felt relaxed when I took the opportunity to draw the customers during our coffee break this morning. Perhaps the prospect of a large latte was helping me get in a suitably laid back mood too.
I like the way my new fountain pen glides about on the paper, perhaps a bit out of control but that’s something that it can be good to go along with. In fact I’m getting so mellow that I even quite like the wax-resist effect of the paper in my Moleskine sketchbook, an effect probably accentuated by my hand resting on the paper as I draw.
Auntie Bar
As an 9 or 10 year old I pinned a map of Africa on my bedroom wall, surrounded by a collection of the 3D models of African animal heads that they printed on the back of Corn Flake packets. I hoped that some day I’d be able to fly out to Tanganyika to visit my godparents, Barbara and Jack Wilkinson, though sadly that never happened. I’ve still got the five inch tall ebony warrior that they sent me. He still sports his feathery plume, hide shield and Masai regalia but he lost his spear long ago.
Jack taught biology at the agricultural college at Arusha, close to the Kenyan border. It’s a beautiful setting with Mount Meru and Kilimanjaro looming in the background. Returning to Britain when Tanzania won its independence, they settled in Leek, Staffordshire, where Jack continued to teach biology. He died of cancer about thirty years ago.
Barbara was doing fine when we visited her last summer before my mum’s fall but she too had a fall at new year. She died on the morning of my mum’s funeral. Like my mum she was in her 97th year.
We made our way, via the Peak District, to her funeral today. I’ll miss our occasional visits to Leek to meet up with her and go out for a lunch, which for me was always Staffordshire oatcakes (a kind of pancake), at the White Hart Tearooms.
Fast Figures
Waiting in audiology gives me a few moments to make snapshot sketches of the medical staff and patients, trying to take in as much detail as I can as they pass then sketching from memory.
The man with broad shoulders in the black leather jacket was such a distinctive character but it wasn’t until he reappeared that I noted that he was wearing baggy black trousers, not matching leather trousers as I’d assumed. You can see my initial sketch was of close-fitting trousers.
The bowl of sugar lumps is from yesterday’s coffee break at the Brasserie in the Courtyard near Settle.