Waterton looks suitably sepulchral as, in 1830, in what could be seen as a kind of penance, he takes to sleeping on the bare boards of his work-room after the death of his young wife soon after she gave birth to their son Edmund.
In a moonlit room, the lightest tone is going to be the sky seen through the window but I’m going to have to redraw all or part of this frame of my section of the Waterton comic because I need more emphasis on the figure of Waterton. Your eyes adapt to the varying levels of illumination as you look around a dimly lit room, so I feel justified in introducing silvery highlights to the main subject. Could I also introduce a few beams of light streaking down from the window. That might be overdoing it but it would be fun to try.
I rearranged the furniture slightly from my first floor plan, using doll’s house furniture made by my great great uncle Joe Truelove for my mum c. 1924.
Any of our Pageant Players’ dramas or farces set in a room called for what our producer called a box set, which was constructed of 12 x 4ft flats, one or two with doors in them. There were often French windows too. I feel as if I’ve been designing a theatre set for this introductory scene to Act 2 of my Waterton comic.
After thinking about the spaces on the upper floor of Walton Hall, I’ve focussed on one corner into which I can fit all the points mentioned in Norman Moore’s description of Charles Waterton’s work-room. I was going to omit the fireplace but as an old map of Guiana hung above the mantlepiece, it has to be included.
In this scene, Waterton is lying awake with a tear welling up in his eye. I’ll have to leave that detail to the reader’s imagination because I want to include the whole of his recumbent figure, lying there on the bare boards like an Egyptian mummy. The lighting and the bare boards serve to tell the story of his loneliness after his bereavement.
Designing a Victorian room that reflects eccentric interests and a colourful adventures of its occupant makes me think of the various room sets that I’ve seen for Sherlock Holmes’ consulting rooms at 221b Baker Street.
I’ve found the Huion light-pad that I bought for tracing my roughs equally useful for sorting slides, when I was searching for my 1977 photographs of Walton Hall before its restoration.
The Organ Gallery, looking towards the Water Gate (on which Waterton set up the crucifix).Walton Hall on its island in the lake, from the south south -west.
Today I’m doing a little research for a set design for my Waterton comic. John Whitaker, a curator at Wakefield Museum (and the author of the comic) has referred me to a description of Waterton’s work-room, written by Norman Moore in his introduction to Waterton’s Natural History Essays (p. 127);
On the top floor of the house, in the opposite direction to the organ gallery [part of Waterton’s museum], was the chapel, and a small room which was at once Waterton’s study, bird-stuffing workshop and bed-room, if bed-room it could be called when there was not any bed. The Wanderer always slept on the boards, wrapped up in a blanket. His pillow was a block of oak, which had been originally rough, and in course of years had become almost polished by use. The entire room revealed at a glance the simple tastes of its occupant. Some prints and pictures, which in his eyes had a meaning superior to art, hung on the walls, some shelves contained his favourite books, his jug and basin stood on a chair, and he had a little round looking-glass and a table. Over the mantel-piece was an old map of Guiana, a record to him of living scenes and loving memories. For mere ornament’s sake, there was nothing. To the sleeping eye all rooms are equally blank, and when Waterton was awake in his work-room he was mostly intent upon inward thoughts or outward occupations.
The Organ Gallery
The Organ Gallery, 1977. Apologies for the exposure on this Kodachrome slide.
I remember the ‘Organ Gallery’ with its oak panelling which I assumed was salvaged from the Tudor/medieval Walton Hall when the present hall was built in the eighteenth century. There were chests, with initials and carved dates from the 1600s built into the window bays. Unfortunately all the panelling was removed when the hall was converted for use as a country club and hotel in the late 1970s. This corner room became part of the manager’s flat and a kitchen was installed. This might be the only existing photograph of the Organ Gallery, which in Waterton’s day housed an extension of the museum, which was displayed almost entirely on the staircase.
First thoughts on a room plan.
If Waterton’s room was ‘in the opposite direction’ that might mean the south-east corner, with the best view of the lake. If it was on this corner it would have light throughout the day, which Waterton would need for his meticulous work, so that’s what I’ll go with.
In older photographs, the sash windows of the Hall were divided into six lights, top and bottom, so they looked more Georgian than in my photographs.
This first floor room was, according to my mum when we visited in 1977, the room in which I was born. When the hall was converted into a hotel and sports club, the hospital partition walls were removed and this became part of a spacious function room where Barbara and I had our wedding reception in September 1983.
When I was born in Walton Hall, then a maternity hospital, there were tales amongst the midwives that at a particular hour of the night/very early morning, there would be the sound of movement upstairs which they put down to the spirit of Charles Waterton, a devout Catholic, rising early to say his morning prayers in the upstairs chapel.
My mum, who had arrived at the hall after dark, remembered the following day seeing a flock of birds fly past the window. The nurses told her these were Canada geese flying up from the lake which surrounds the house like an overgrown moat.
I’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.
Pasting 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!
It’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.
I 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.
We’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.
The 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!
After 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.
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.
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.
I’ve added the lettering to my opening title frame, which brings things together. I can decide later whether I want to stick with these colours and whether I want to introduce hand-lettering for the captions. As the script has yet to take on its final form, it would be wise for now to stick with a computer generated font for the speech bubbles.
With so many drawings to do, it might seem counterproductive to lavish a few hours on the title for my comic strip, which I could have added in minutes in Photoshop or Manga Studio but it helps me establish the mood of the story. I’ll probably modify it later but this will suffice to set the scene.
The inspiration for the blocky lettering comes from the Channel 4 series Amazing Spaces Shed of the Year. Their freehand, cross-hatched logo suggests the blockiness of a shed and its homespun design. I’m going for a Victorian feel in my illustrations, so why shouldn’t I try cross-hatching my lettering.
Waterton campaigning against the enclosure of Heath Common, January 1844.
I was also thinking about the posters that Waterton had printed for his campaign to save the last open spaces available to the people of Wakefield.
The starting point for my title was a typeface called Superclarendon Bold, which I’ve squared up as a visual metaphor for the wall that Waterton built around his nature reserve in a heroic attempt to save it from poachers and pollution.
Waterton’s signature from a letter dated 1859 (see below).
We’ve discussed using a font or handlettering based on Charles Waterton’s handwriting throughout the comic but I think that would give the story an elegant period flavour, introducing a hint of Jane Austen. I’m aiming at something more robust and chunky.
Like so many of us from the West Riding of Yorkshire, Waterton liked to spend his holidays at Scarborough.
After 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.
How do I make him look more like an idle bystander? How would that come across in his body language?
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.
