A horror story.

Page 1 if I recall correctly, a mysterious window -- ooh er Mrs. I wonder what could this portent foretell...

Page 2 ...well nothing good that's for sure.

Page 3 The plot thickens--then evaporates in to thin air.

What do we have here then--well it a few pages from an aborted comic strip that I found recently while digging through some old work. I only found the photocopies I'm afraid because the artwork was handed over to someone else around the time I left the project. The story concerns a vampire, the woman or old bag you see in the panels but her misdeeds and malfeasance are not the horror story I'm refereeing to by naming this post, a horror story. No the horror story referrers to the tribulations concerning the generation of this artwork together with a few other pages and some character sketches.

You see, it's not my creation, rather it was a collaboration with an author. This guy was/is pretty literate and intelligent, the trouble was he couldn't get his head round the idea that something had to happen on the page for an illustrated narrative to work. Instead he would provide a script that consisted of a page of foolscap that translated to around sixteen illustrated pages. You see the second page of this sample of artwork, where there is no dialogue, well the version presented here very much represents a précis from the original. Needless to say there was a lot of too and froing, arguing the toss and such, none of which I won and since I didn't care for idea of slogging out all the pages need to accommodate a disproportionately concise script, I exited the endeavour.

Only that's not the last of it, you see these reproduction might be of the original artwork or they might be from the redrawn artwork that I created when the originals were accidentally destroyed. I admit that I somewhat foolishly decided to use Higgins ink instead of the normal Windsor and Newton waterproof Indian ink and wouldn't you know, the artwork got wet...

...ugh.

Oh yeah and just don't ask about the spelling for the speech bubbles...

A neddy and some explanation

You might recall that quite some time ago I sort of promised I'd post something on linear perspective and you probably also noticed that it hasn't appeared. Honestly I'm not deliberately teasing, I have actually bashed out some words on the subject but after reviewing the first attempts I found them  hopelessly anorak orientated and filed those drafts under B. I'm in the middle of my latest attempt which is better -- ish and was hoping to post something soon, only something's come up that need my attention, a prospect of some regular illustration work. Normally I'm pretty dismissive of these prospects, I've seen too many of 'em of evaporate but this one coincides with a focus of my interest, so I'm gonna give it a go. Meanwhile I'd thought I'd stick up a picture up for entertainment value, this is a very old drawing that I used reference gleaned from one of those pony mags for. It's the pencil drawing for and piece of ink work, which I don't have. I had the inked version pinned to the wall of my studio (bedroom) for quite some time, till a colleague took a shine to it, so I gave him the drawing, which he passed on to his daughter.

This drawing has also been submitted to one of those on demand print sites. I was a bit naive about how those sites work and kind of expected to do some business. After a while it became clear that they're not much more than an exercise in vanity publication, so prompted by disillusion I put ridiculous prices on the stuff I submitted. Anyway here it is for free, albeit in a reduced resolution although if you right click on the pop up a higher resolution file should be available as a lossless png.

The Doodle Files 5

Strictly speaking I suppose these aren't doodles, although the first one probably qualifies since it was inspired a hare brained scheme to pitch for a syndicated strip but that was Tuesday, so to speak. After a little pondering on the chores involved in churning out a Garth pastiche every week, I thought better of it. They're a little blurry I'm afraid, probably had the camera on daylight.

I've started using a black water soluble lead similar to that Stabilo that I used down to the stump a while ago but with a clutch pencil arrangement. This lead's not quite so soft, still good though and it has the advantage of not suffering from the glare you get from graphite, which is important at the moment cos I'm still working on my lap with a drawing pad and overhead light. The second one is a mixture of graphite and water soluble, the first is that rather gritty large diameter, 5 point something millimetres, water soluble lead, that works rather nicely on textured paper. Talking of textured paper, where did stipple board disappear to? can't find it listed in any of the art shops.

Gurn, fate's chosen man of destiny.

Richard the III for lettering practice, don't ask why.

The doodle files 4

Got a new pencil last week, it's a chunky clutch pencil that takes massive leads, it came some with sepia ones, which are a bit like the Steadler non-print leads in texture. That means you hafta do the drawing in one hit, the lines don't erase too well off soft surfaces but it seems as though this pencil has got a way with that emulation of the classic British comic style I was trying to do the other week. I've been much more successful with it, as I tried a couple of Ken Reid characters first.

First attempt, I used some of the Frankie Stein stuff I'd seen around on the web as a guide, I noticed some aspects of Ken Reid's hand, he had a way of doing sickle shaped curves that I managed to emulate a bit on the chin, nose is odd though.

Now it the turn of Frankie's "dad", used some reference again, hasn't quite got the right look, the mouth isn't expressive enough, in fact it looks a bit like my dad, I dunno if I should admit that.

First try without reference, looks more Baxendale than Reid but that's ok, he's good too. I think I went a bit too far with the adam's apple as well.

Pastels

Pastels I like 'em, the drawing that people who're good with them produce and mucking about with 'em myself. Unfortunately I'm not very good with them, actually I should say I'm quite bad with them, if not very bad. There are a few problems in using them because there's no art shop here so to get materials I need to trek 20 miles to nearest one or order on-line. The other thing is that decent paper is no longer available it seems, or at least not easily at a reasonable price. That's another one of those frustrations that seem to increasingly be a problem for artists, a lot the items we used to take for granted are now gone or difficult to get hold of. You can get that sort lumpy paper, what's it called Canson but that has to be made of linen to be any use and the stuff I can find feels like drawing on cotton wool.

Anyway I got a roll of 90gsm Kraft Paper off e-bay and it seems reasonable quality, unfortunately it's ribbed, I don't mind that so much but it impairs the saleability of drawings. Incidentally the calendared side of Kraft (not all of it is calendered) is an excellent inking surface, better than Bristol board and a tenth of the price but bleached Kraft is now almost impossible to get retail in this country. Anyway I took a couple of snaps of my latest effort, executed in my piteously laboured style.

The face has come out a bit pasty here, that does happen if you view the drawing at an angle before it's been fixed. The hair is just awful as well, too much heat, I know I should use green as a base for blonde but I just can't get out of the habit of using a red earth colour.

I did a little more to it after this, you can see a nasty dark area under the  mouth on the left that I moderated. I also made the mouth a bit pinker. Don't think I'll do much more, I might try to flog it but I think I need a lot more practice before I can ask people to pay for 'em.

Doodle files 3

There's quite a famous depiction of The Riddler, I think it's the first time he appeared in print. The drawing could be a character study of Frank Gorshin and might explain why he was cast in the sixties TV series. In the entire history of casting characters from popular fiction was anyone more perfectly cast than Frank Gorshin? The only one who comes comes close is Telly Savalas as Blofeld.

Burgess Meredith does a good job as the Penguin largely because he doesn't push the character too far, I suppose that's a legacy of his acting background. Danny DeVito is an excellent character actor but his Penguin has been monkeyed with to such an extent it's barely recognisable. His physical deformity and disgusting sanitary habits are too an overt depiction of corruption, The Penguin should have a facile veneer of manners and sartorial sophistication afforded by his Morning attire that contrasts with his wickedness.

The doodle files 2

A couple of those desk top doodles again, together with two I actually bothered to put on real paper.

John Malkovich as Julian Karswell

Things going a little Manga

I found the original Naughty Boy Island pencil rough

After deciding my NBI rough (see above) was too prosaic I sat down an tried to draw inspiration from the classic English comic illustrators with rather appalling results as you can see.

A tiny piece of history.

I've just found this, the first drawing, I'd coloured with Photoshop, ooh ages ago. I'd been working producing 2d computer graphics for a  for a while, mostly kinda flashy backgrounds and fancy do das for early versions of AV software produced with things like Macromedia. Those were mostly done in software but in a spare moment I decided to exercise my traditional drawing skills and see if I could colour something up. Thinking about it, this was probably a doodle, it' wasn't inked or anything just drawn in pencil and scanned. It's not particularly impressive, it kinda breaks the colour rule about reversing the heat of the hue in the shadows. You know, the one that goes: warm highlights/cool shadows or cool highlights/warm shadows, but it was done very quickly and I quite liked that aspect. Oh yeah, the subject happens to be a naked lady, it was probably spring, that's my excuse anyway.

The doodle files

Doodles they're kinda interesting but they most often get get assigned to oblivion pretty instantly, I admit some of mine have hung around a lot longer than that, not getting thrown out till they've been virtually obliterated by assorted beverage stains. I'm not labouring under any delusion that these particular examples are noteworthy to any degree but I fancied documenting them because I'm interested in doodles:

Some doodles are doomed to an early extinction because the urge to draw something is so insistent that you pick up the nearest implement, in this case an aquarellabe Stabilo and doodle on the most convenient surface at hand, the table top adjacent to my laptop.

Let's not forget the all time classic, the back of an envelope. I obliterated the return address here, I've no idea who it was, it's a PO Box number but I'm wary of the risks of inundating some poor sap's post with trash spawned by internet pranksters.

This one demonstrates a nice aspect of doodling, it's not constrained by convention, so if you get something wrong, like the nose and lips here, you can just draw them somewhere else, who say's they havta be in the right location?

Hair? let's make her? him? (a bit andronginous this one) mostly bald cos I wanna draw an ear. Another example of translocation, got the hand wrong? just do another one in the corner.

Let's try out this ink I found on in the back of the cupboard to see if it's any good? The answer to that would be no. I masked out my name here, not because I'm concerned about DeadSpiderEye's secret identity being revealed, you can track that down in less than a minute with Google, but it's almost the same as my signature and publishing that on the web might be -- um foolish.

Inking examples

This is a response to Sharon Souter who mentioned she'd like to see some inking examples that I considered to be suitable for comic art. These are a couple of items from my portfolio that I think match that criteria. As you can see the line work is quite bold, bolder than is probably necessary with today's improved reprographics but I like the style that arose through the strictures imposed by reproduction methods, so i tend to stick with this kind of line weight, if i'm thinking comics. I think today, an artist has much more latitude if they want a finer line weight or they can even go into, fine halftone rather those coarse mechanical tints applied in the past.

These scans have been prepared for repo but it really would be more useful to Sharon to show some photos of the unprepared artwork too, so I may update this post when I can dig them out and snap them.

This one's been reduced to about 60% of the original, it was rendered in Indian on drafting film. The broad areas are applied with size a 3 brush, the finer lines with a size 0 that's had the kick on the tip removed by searing the point. Tipping the brush, gives a flatter, more constant line and eliminates flaming which is the tendency for strokes to end in a point. The downside being that you have less control for finer linework. One big advantage with applying ink with a brush is that it dries a lot faster than pen because less ink is applied, this is particularly true on hard surfaces and drafting film is 100% impermeable to ink.

This drawing is about 80% of original size on my monitor, it complements the other one nicely because it's executed in pen on drafting film. As you can see the character of the line work is much more vigorous, there's lots of scratching about, I don't like hatching, so much of my pen work tends to more spontaneous than the brush stuff, with less penciling in of where I'm going to but my strokes. As I mentioned, pen dries slower (a lot slower on drafting film) on all surfaces but the upside is that it needs less retouching, there's a more consistent film of ink applied.

On occasion portions of the work will need to be dried under a lamp before you can finish them. That's not such a bad thing in a working environment as you might think, there's always something to do while the ink is drying.

Black Dress

I was planning to post a short story over the weekend but it's one of those works that's taken on a life of its own and I need to work it throught to see how it turns out. Meanwhile here's a picture I did ages ago, yeah I know it's blue rather than black, it's a comic thing. It's a useful picture because it demonstrates some colouring technique. As you can see there are two stages of the drawing, one's a simple wash the second has has had opaque worked into it. The medium is acrylic on cheap but quite heavy, Cotman watercolour paper. The actual drawings are quite small, probably about the resolution you can see them at, about 4" tall.