Category: People

The Poachers Re-poached

knifeworkI’ve been struggling to get this knife to break out of the frame, cutting across the border in the program that I’m using to lay out my comic strip artwork, Manga Studio EX5. Even after watching a YouTube tutorial by Manga Studio doyen Doug Hills, I’ve had to go back to Photoshop, which I’ve been using since the 1990s, to the cut around the artwork. There must be a way to do that in Manga Studio, but I’m not there yet.

first pagesPasting up the comic on screen is a flexible way of working but the finished product will be printed on A4 paper so, as I’m now a quarter of the way through the project, I decided it was a good time to print out my pages to see how it’s all coming together.

I like the splash of colour in the opening frame and the low key colour of the soap works page but my favourite frame so far is the one where the poacher is forced to drop his knife. And it looks even better with the knife looming out of the frame and coming towards you!

Link; Doug Hills Manga Studio 5 Webinar; Drawing Digital Comics for Beginners

One Eye Closed

The squireIt’s time to move on from this first page of the Waterton comic, but here it is at last. I feel that I’ve overdone a scene that should have been given the lightest of touches but, having worked out the staging and the details, I can always come back to it later, when I’ve had more practice and I’ve developed a house style.

page 1I don’t think that it harms to overdo artwork occasionally, you need to feel free to experiment, so I’m glad that I’m not up against a tight deadline.

I was surprised how difficult it was to get Squire Waterton to look as if he is winking at the reader. Although I’m always thinking in terms of scenes from a movie, a single drawing represents just one moment, much as I try to relate it to the next or the previous frame.

A wink depends on the recipient of the gesture seeing the start and finish of the movement. One eye kept closed indefinitely doesn’t have the same meaning, but in a single drawing, it’s difficult not to give the impression that an action is frozen in time. A freer style might suggest the the movement was in progress.

Boy with a Hoop

head and shouldersframeMy great grandfather George Swift was born in Sheffield in 1840 so I guess that this portrait of him was painted around 1845. As far as I can tell, the painting isn’t signed.

It reminds me of those formal Victorian studio portrait photographs which often have a formal park on a painted backdrop.

socksflora

My mum remembered as a toddler being prompted to look at this painting and say ‘Granddad, pull your sock up!’

The urn of flowers is a corner of the painting that appeals to me. I can imagine the portrait being produced by a team, with one artist adding the floral flourishes.

dome

George SwiftThe pleasure dome in the background looks like the artist’s invention but the setting reminds me of Sheffield Botanical Gardens, a place that my great granddad George was familiar with.

When we drive past the gardens, I always find myself remembering my mum’s story that, when she was a baby, George would push her in her pram to the gardens but he complained that;

‘This baby always starts crying as soon as I get to the gates! And I have to turn around and bring her back to be fed.’

His good looks have come down through the generations and we’ve got photographs of one of his great great great grandsons standing by the portrait, hoop in hand looking very like his ancestor.

I had some difficulty photographing the painting because of the glossy varnish. Surprisingly, even though I had my camera on a tripod it came up with a ‘blink detected’ warning! I think it’s more likely that great granddad was winking at me.

Blitz Damage

versopatchThe canvas has a tale to tell. Two patches of rubber glued to the back show where it was repaired when a bomb hit my granddad Swift’s house during the Sheffield Blitz.

lips1846rowneyThere are two maker’s stamps on the back of the 3ft x 2ft 6 inch canvas. Geo. Rowney & Co. supplied the canvas, and perhaps the stretcher. I can’t decipher that London address.

There’s a clearer stamp from H. Hodgson of 39 West Street, Sheffield. It appears that Hodgson was a ‘Carvre & Gildre’, so presumably the carver and gilder who supplied the ornate frame.

1846hodgsonIf you’ve any ideas on that last line of Hodgson’s stamp, please let me know. Could that last word be ‘Stationer’?

Beatson; Girl with a Book

Gladys Joan Bell, 1924My mum, Gladys Joan Swift (as she was then), looks about six in this portrait, so it must have been painted around 1924.

signaturecanvasIt was painted in Sheffield by Charles Beatson (1864 – 1949). He painted historical subjects including a Portrait of a Cavalier. In those subjects, I can see the influence by of Dutch painters and I think there are hints of that in this portrait, that’s if you can get past mum’s 1920s party dress!

The canvas is 3ft x 2ft 6 inches. There’s no makers name on the back.

book

mumbook2I’d love to identify the book that my mum is holding. It might be there to add a splash of colour but, even so, it looks like a particular title. It’s possible that my mum had brought a book with her to the sitting but I think that it’s more likely to be a prop, something Beatson was able to put his hands on in the studio.

When I invert and stretch it in Photoshop, the illustration on the back cover looks like a woman reading from an open book to a boy.

Gladys Joan Swift, oil painting by Charles Beatson.One of my mum’s favourite books was Alice in Wonderland. In her final illness, in January this year, when she was confined to bed in a nursing home, she asked me to look out her childhood copy of Alice and to bring it in and read it to her, describing to me just where I’d find it on the bookshelf. I’m sorry that I didn’t get around to doing that before she passed away but between the two of us we managed to remember a few of the lines from the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.

Talking Hats

conversationwild eyesWe’re back to that staple of Victorian melodrama, gentlemen in top hats in rapt conversation. As a contrast to the businesslike surveyor (on the left) I’d originally had Waterton going hatless but then he looked too much like a canal worker so I’ve imagined him in threadbare coat and battered hat.

Battered hats are more fun to draw.

WatertonThe script calls for Waterton to look wild-eyed so I’ve been trying different eye-shapes to get that across. I’m thinking of castaway Ben Gunn prattling on about Flint’s treasure or the Ancient Mariner stopping one of three to tell his tale. But Waterton is playing a practical joke on the surveyor, so he can look amused as well as manic.

With that in mind, I felt that his thumb and finger gesture looked as little too precise in my pencil rough. I was concentrating so much on this gesture that I gave Waterton five fingers!

conversation

eye and handAfter struggling with the final artwork in my last frame, I decided to work out everything carefully in my roughs. I even thought about the direction of the shading.

Even after producing the elaborate rough above, I felt that I needed to tweak the eyes, and as I’ve mentioned already, the hand.

Once again my light pad has been in use again and again throughout the day.

On the Banks of the Barnsley Canal

canalsideI’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.

The Ragged-Trousered Conservationist

first roughCharles 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.

Barnsley canal

Sitting on the Fence

sitting on the fencesitting on the fenceHow 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

fence roughWaterton 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.

final rough

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

poachers framespoacher pageYou 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;

  1. Be bold
  2. Be relaxed
  3. Learn a bit more about Manga Studio (the program I use to add the borders)

 

Poacher Punch-up

punch upI’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.

strangleholdHaving 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

fight with poachersI’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.

handfightFor 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!

Manga Now! by Keith Sparrow and The Big Painting Challenge by Rosa Roberts.
Manga Now! by Keith Sparrow and The Big Painting Challenge by Rosa Roberts. Wish that I had time to go through the tutorials in both these books but at least they can give me a few tips for aspects of my comic strip.

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 like this scribbly attempt to draw my hand in the right position as a drawing but it's not much use as reference for my comic strip.
I like this scribbly attempt to draw my hand in the right position as a drawing but it’s not much use as reference for my comic strip.

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