Tag: Waterton Comic

Polishing up those Roughs

cravat rough

throwing away the cravatAs so often happens, I feel this rough drawing of Charles Waterton for the comic project is more lively than my finished, cross-hatched illustrations. I hope that I can bring a bit of this freedom into my finished work.

When I think of roughs I think of layout paper, pencil and shorthand sketches but it’s a big jump from those to the final artwork. You can easily lose the initial spontaneity.

At college our tutor Quentin Blake said that he preferred to get away from pencil on layout paper roughs as soon as possible and start working on whatever paper and in whatever medium he was going to use for the final artwork.

In two revised roughs for my poachers page, I decided to draw in pen and watercolour so that I can drop scans of these roughs into the almost finished page. It gives me and my writer a much better idea of how the finished page might look.

poacher page

gatesrough

As you can see from the drawing of the park gates, layout paper soon cockles under a watercolour wash, so I might start using cartridge paper for this kind of halfway to finished rough.

I often find myself thinking of my comic strip when I draw from life, for instance the lime trees foliage today had me thinking of how I might make the backgrounds to the scenes in Waterton’s park look convincing but not overworked.

lime leaves

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)

 

Poachers in Colour

poachersI finished adding cross-hatching to the last of the battle with the poachers panels this morning and I’ve spent the afternoon adding colour.

fist fightWhat a difference it makes both to the atmosphere of the page and in colour coding the characters so that in the tangle of battling bodies you’ve got a chance of distinguishing which arm and leg belongs to which character.

fightingFor sketching I always use a water-brush but with such a large area to fill I took a number 11, and later a number 7, sable brush from the drawer and for the first time in months took out my large box of Winsor and Newton artists’ watercolours.

dropping the knifeI opted for the large box because I wanted to run the colours into each other so I needed several separate divisions in the palette (my regular bijou box has only two divisions). To give an impression of a rainy evening, I stuck to a limited palette of cobalt blue, yellow ochre and sepia with just a touch of nickel titanium yellow (a lemon yellow) for the lightest areas of the grass and a hint of scarlet lake for the lips.

Waterton overcome

This page has been so different to the Soap Works confrontation because there’s so much action going on. My new broad-nibbed Lamy Safari pen (filled with Noodler’s black) has been a catalyst for me to rethink my approach and I’ve come up with what I’d call a loose Victorian engraving style which I think suits the subject but, more importantly, which I feel more at ease with it, so I should be able to work more quickly from now on and enjoy what I’m doing.

There’s no rule that you shouldn’t enjoy artwork, even when you’re working on an important commission.

stranglehold

What you’re not seeing here are the speech balloons although in this frame I think all that Waterton would be able to say in this stranglehold would be ‘Arrgh!’ The ruled borders to the frames, which I’ll add in Manga Studio, will cut off the ragged edges of the rectangular panels, giving the strip a crisper feel. I made an exception and drew the frame for this central scene, using a compass with a ruling pen attachment that I bought when I was working on my first book A Sketchbook of the Natural History of the Country Round Wakefield, which coincidently features a short Waterton comic strip.

kick-off

I’m glad that as I went on through the frames on this page I became more relaxed in my drawing. My favourite panel is the close-up of the poacher being forced to drop the knife but this panel of Waterton making a rally and with one last effort kicking the poacher away, is the most lively looking of the bunch and a good example of how I’d be able to use a bit of hatching in any scene, not just a night scene like this one.

By the way, this cut-to-white illustration of battling figures won’t have a ruled border.

The victorThis last frame of Waterton seeing off the poacher is one of the most awkward, as I was experimenting with the woodcut technique of shading. I don’t rule out doing it again, if it appears totally out of context with the rest of the page but I’ll wait until I’ve seen it in with ruled edges and with no less than three speech bubbles. Those formalities should tie it in with the rest of the artwork.

Black Freighter, Yellow Pen

poachers, Lamy Safari penfisticuffsBlack humour, everyday characters but real menace; that’s just the atmosphere that I’m looking for in my battle with poachers scene for the Waterton comic. This morning I’m getting a bit of inspiration from Radio 3; Lotte Lenya singing Pirate Jenny from Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera, lyrics by Bertolt Brecht. Jenny, the much put upon maid in a ‘crummy hotel’ conjures up a ‘Black Freighter’ with 50 long cannons and a pirate crew running into hundreds to reek her dreadful revenge on the entire town, with the exception of her ‘crummy hotel’.

fight sceneIt’s funny but chilling and there’s a mischievous, improvised quality to the performance. I feel that I can learn from it by aiming to build a feeling of menace in a situation that has an underlying ridiculousness. Hitchcock did that so well. The poachers episode of the Waterton story has elements of the petty villainy of Bill Sykes but also of Laurel and Hardy slapstick. Not to mention Brecht’s Mack the Knife.

In these eight panels of the comic strip, Charles Waterton risks being shot, stabbed and strangled but, at the end of the tussle, he and the poacher end up with each other’s hats. Which is what really happened.

Lamy Safari Broad Nib

Lamy Safari with Z24 converter and broad nib, filled with Noodler's Black ink.
Lamy Safari with Z24 converter and broad nib, filled with Noodler’s Black ink.

I ordered a yellow pen so that I don’t confuse my new Lamy Safari with the three Safaris and the AlStar that I’m already using. I’ve gone for a broad nib because I feel that the foreground figures need to stand out more.

lamy fine and broad nibs
As you’d expect, the broad nib is freer flowing than the fine.

I like the bolder look so much that I use it for the whole scene. In my first attempt at adding the shadows to one of the frames I went for a traditional woodcut look in which is areas of black are surrounded by hatching (below, left). But I’m not totally comfortable with this style as I don’t have a background in printmaking.

Woodcut versus Hatching

Hatching and cross-hatching.
Hatching and cross-hatching.
Woodcut effect.
Woodcut effect.

What I’m used to is sketchbook drawings which involve no forward planning, other than deciding where to start on the page. I like to pick up a pen start making marks. This may produce a fussy effect that the preplanned graphic crispness of the woodcut style, but it can also give a more improvised look.

It’s a rather naive way of working, one which reminds me of Glen Baxter’s parodies of literal Boys Own Paper style drawings of unlikely misadventures. That seems appropriate for Charles Waterton’s Quixotic adventures, provided that I can keep a hint of menace running through it.

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

The Obsequious Mr Simpson

Waterton confronts SimpsonI keep imagining that I’m producing a stage play. Mr Simpson is really getting into his character as the villain of the piece, all sneers and sarcasm, but, as an illustrator I’m responsible for the bit part players too; fo their costume, make-up, even their back story, as far as it goes.

I can imagine the extra playing the labourer saying to me ‘What’s my motivation in this scene?’

‘Er . . . could you lean on your shovel and smirk, as if you’re thinking “this should be fun”?’

Waterton comic page 9I’ve learnt a lot about the strategy of producing a comic strip while working on this page. For instance, for those first two panels (which were the last to be completed) I drew them both first and then coloured them together, to save mixing the colours twice.

I realise that a decisive style is going to work best, rather than the soft tentative approach that I use for natural history subjects. Plenty of structure and drama is what’s needed in a comic strip.

Whatever my misgivings about this page, I’m now leaving it until I’ve finished the other eleven pages, then I can come back to it and review it. Hopefully I will feel that it still works in the context of the story.

How do I stop WordPress Compressing my Files?

Setting compression to 100% in the Media settings in WordPress. But it still compresses to 90%!
Setting compression to 100% in the Media settings in WordPress. But it still compresses to 90%!
blurred
So how come this image is so sharp? It’s a PNG and WordPress doesn’t ‘help’ you save bandwidth by compressing them.

Having gone to so much trouble, I’m keen that my work comes over as crisply as possible in this blog, allowing for the inevitable loss of sharpness that you’re always going to get between the paper version and the onscreen image. I’ve added a plugin to stop my web page program WordPress compressing my JPGs (which it does in order to save bandwidth) as this is what makes them lose sharpness.

Yes, I know that it’s a marginal loss of sharpness, but I’m an illustrator. We worry about such things!

Unfortunately the plugin that I’m using, WP Resized Image Quality, hasn’t been tested on the latest version of WordPress and, would you believe it, my JPGs, which I’ve already tweaked to perfection in Photoshop, are still getting compressed.

Any tips would be welcome!

Links; WP Resized Image Quality 

By the way, I checked with Christine Rondeau who designed Mon Cahier, the theme that I use for my WordPress posts, and she tells me the compression definitely isn’t happening there.

Pall of Smoke

colouringI can see the influence of decades of scenery painting in these frames for the showdown in my Waterton comic strip. The perspective in the Soap Works in the background is similar to some of the village scenes that I’ve painted over years, except you can’t imagine the principles and chorus breaking into a rendition of On a Wonderful Day like Today with that pall of smoke hanging over the village of Walton.

But, dominating the stage, dressed in black with that stove pipe hat, ‘Soapy’ Simpson makes a very hissable villain. I can picture it now;

SIMPSON: Yes, boys and girls, I’m going to poison every tree in Walton. Ha! ha! Ha!

WATERTON: Oh no you won’t!

SIMPSON: OH  YES  I  WILL!

It’s been a rather mechanical activity producing three almost identical versions of the background but useful practice  for me to get myself into the habit of being consistent with colour, line and characters. I look forward to finishing this off tomorrow and dropping the scanned illustrations into the blank frames that I’ve created for the page in Manga Studio.

Storyboarding Waterton

storyboard
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.

park mapI’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.

Soapy Simpson

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.

abuse

storyboardThe 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.

Waterton's WakefieldHere’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