Copywriters.

I read a lot in my spare time. Mainly concentrating on Sci-Fi, history and art subjects, but I am fairly widely read.  Currently reading Dickens’ Bleak House, and have a number of others backing up on my Kindle. 

 I’m always thinking of ideas for my Zazzle store and so the idea of classic authors seemed a decent enough possibility.  Then I also remembered that Zazzle allows people to customise each image (as long as the store owner allows them) and it seemed even more interesting.

  I thought – find a number of Victorian writers, preferably who had been photographed and I could then do my own interpretation of the photo.  Photography seemed important, because then I wouldn’t find myself trying to copy another artist’s work.  And because of copyright reasons they would have to be particularly old images.  I did a little search on Google, to see how many I could find that were decent enough to give me the visual cues I needed. 

 A surprising number of nineteenth century writers and artists had been photographed, some of the biggies such as Dickens and Poe, and a surprising few omissions (no Bronte sisters even though they lived at the beginning of photography) but of course I was conscious also that people like Burns had died before photography.  I realise if I'm to go forward with this I will have to make use of paintings, drawing and whatever I can find.  After all, I can hardly leave out Jane Austin and Mary Shelly just because there are no photographs of them.  

 So the idea is, a number of writers with a big speech bubble placed next to them, where someone using the customising function could place their favourite quote either from a book or an actual statement made by the author.

Mr Poe, Mr Thackeray, and Mr Dickens.

Then I (of course) began to have doubts.  Were these old photographs really as copyright free as I believed?  Who actually owns them?  I began to backpeddle slightly.  The H. P. Lovecraft image I had done now appeared very problematic.  I knew that his friend August Derleth had taken over his estate and was largely responsible for his popularity today.  It was obvious that the Lovecraft image was a no-go.  

Zazzle are pretty pro-active about removing things from their site if they think there will be a copyright problem

Mr Lovecraft.  I think he's alright on my blog, but don't expect to see him on Zazzle anytime soon.

so I'll trust to them to know what's applicable, and remove anything that they're nervous about.  I still think I'm okay with Dickens and Thackeray and Eliot, but Konrad?  He died in the twenties, and I always thought that copyright lapsed after seventy years.  The photographer is almost certainly not with us anymore either, but what about ownership of the actual image - the face of a person?

Can that be owned by a company after so much time has elapsed?  In fact there's a lot of uncertainty that I haven't seen solid answers for.  Can I use an image if I make sufficient changes to it to make it my own?  Is that picture above of Lovecraft okay, as it obviously doesn't really resemble the actual photograph.  But of course, anybody could easily recognise the photograph I used to make the image, as the face and angle of the face and the lighting is very distinctive.

Well, I'll put some up and see what happens, and if there are any problems - well that'll teach me to copy writers.


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See, that's how you do that.

I'm sometimes asked by people who see a drawing of mine, 'how do you do that?'  And the probable answer of anyone with some skill is likely to be the same as mine  'I don't know.'

But of course we do know, we've spent a long time doing this stuff, but we can't explain, because we're not teachers.  The internet has allowed artists to film a drawing as it proceeds and put it on youtube so that it can be studied by others.  I'm not completely sure how useful that might be as I've always felt you learn mainly by doing and only a little by watching but maybe... maybe I could be a teacher too?

I don't have any fancy cameras to film my drawings, so I thought it still might be useful to break down a work in to handy bite sized chunks - little pictures of the work in progress and see if there's anything useful at the end.

For a while now I've been producing my 'classical' range of decorative designs, merely drawn from ancient sculpted reliefs so there's not much original work in them, but I don't trace them (which would be so easy with a computer,) I attempt to  freehand draw a version of the relief which I then colour with a rough stone effect.

In this blog I thought it might be interesting to show one of these designs as it progresses through various stages, and for this project I've chosen a cavalry soldier from Trajan's column.  This image is found near the top of the column, representing the culmination of Trajan's Dacian campaign, where a number of Roman cavalry caught up with the fleeing Dacian king Decebalus, and the king commits suicide by cutting his throat with a knife.

The death of Decebalus, from Trajan's column.  Conrad Cichorius.
If it's too small for you, click on it.  You may get a bigger image.

This picture is actually a painting, that appeared in a standard work on the Column by German historian Conrad Cichorius, published in 1896.  It's out of copyright so I can use it, however I was disappointed that there were no 'commons' images of this part of the frieze available.  Oh well.  I have used other images for reference, but more of that later.

I have mentioned before that with a digital image  made with software it is usually possible to design the work on layers which 'float' above one another, allowing elements of a design to be separate and to be worked on separately.  This is similar to painting lines on sheets of glass placed one over the other.

With this one, however, rather than fragment the drawing I've kept it simple so that the complete drawing is on one layer, with colour layers floating below.

So to begin.  I'll be drawing the horseman on the extreme left foreground of the scene.

I begin drawing the head.

I usually draw an object as big as possible; on a sheet of paper for instance, you have to be careful of scale, always watching that all elements are going to fit as you progress, with a digital file I make the file pretty big, and then scale the elements.  So if the head is huge and filling the 'paper', then I can scale it down and fit more on to it as I go along.

A comparison.

There will be a lot of changes as I go along no doubt, as a digital approach allows for very easy editing.  If you use computers to write then you'll know how easy it is to make corrections and shuffle text about on a page, when in the past a lot more tinkering about would have been required.
 

Head and upper torso drapery.  The image is scaled down so it can be added to.

Digitally its possible to cut into a drawing, rotate parts, scale them distort and skew lines and generally make an image plastic and changeable. Now as I go on I'm really looking hard at the painting, with it blown up on my computer screen, looking at the drapery, measuring angles and looking for positioning points.  I'm also trying to interpret odd looking things within the image such as the odd structure just behind the soldiers neck, hanging down from the helmet.  What is it?  I don't really know, possibly something used as a helmet liner - it looks like a tassel but I'm not sure.  All I can do is draw it as it appears.

The image continues to be scaled down.   If the start file is big enough, say 8000 x 8000 pixels it shouldn't lose too much resolution.

Earlier I said there would be mistakes, and all artists make them, no matter how good - I suppose its the frequency of them that matters!  But it was about this stage that I begin to see a few problems.  It seems to me that the figure is too short in the torso, he has no stomach area, so I need to lengthen  it by cutting the drawing in half and moving the lower half down - which will obviously leave a gap.

The image seems too short, so a break is made in the middle figure and the gap redrawn.

The whole process is made up of continual readjustments and tweaks to the image, so many in fact I ought to use them to host one of those 'spot the difference' contests.  But there's plenty more to do, as I've still got to do the horse, and the complex drapery of the saddlecloth.

Beginning the horse.  The actual horse looks a bit odd in the sculpture itself.  A bit too small, perhaps?

The horse will raise a few issues, as I may be accused of not drawing it very well.  But I think its reasonably close to the actual horse in the sculpture which is a bit short in the body, (I'm hoping you'll agree).  The figures on Trajan's column vary in quality, probably there were a number of sculptors working on them, and they could have had different subjects to work on.  Some would have been good at some things and not others.

Short - but I think its accurate.

The front legs of this horse are visible but not the back legs, and this throws up a little problem, as I wanted the full horse.  The sculptor must have been thinking of the ploy my father discovered as a child - if you don't know how to draw something, then hide it behind a tree.

I did say earlier that I had other references that I could use, and one off these is another of Conrad Cichorius' beautiful painted scenes.  Here I found another horse and grafted its back legs on to my own horse.  Like so.

Not exactly finished but the whole figure of horse and rider is there.  Now I'm darkening the outlines and putting in colour.

So in conclusion, and after reflection on my own feeble tutoring skills what do I make of  the question 'how do you do that?'  I'm put in mind of a joke I heard the US comedian Steven Wright tell -   and I paraphrase -

A man decides to throw himself off the top of a giant skyscaper in New York.  He plummets and is caught by the wind which throws him back against the building.  He hits the awning over a window and he bounces off - is caught by the wind and thrown clear across the street, tumbling and somersaulting through the air.

He falls down through a number of awnings, slowing down at each window, until he is caught by the wind again and pitched back across the street, accomplishing double someraults as he flies.  He falls lower and lower until he hits a giant awning near the foot of the building bounces off, does a double - triple - quadruple somersault, and lands safely on his feet on the sidewalk.

Nearby a little cat turns to another little cat and says 'you see, that's how you do that.'

And so, my friends - that'd how you do that.

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Mermaids, calling each to each.

A mermaid detail.

The painters, writers and illustrators of the past had a thing for mermaids.  The Pre - Raphaelities, the symbolists and illustrators like Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac all touched on the subject, as well as writers such as Alfred Lord Tennyson and William Butler Yeats.

And of course, T S Elliot in his ‘Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

‘I have heard the mermaids calling each to each.’

I want to try to vary the kinds of thing that can be found at Impspace, my Zazzle shop front, and I’ve designed a few images based on classical relief sculptures (which I’ll probably talk about in a later blog) but mermaids seem to me to fit the fantasy base of most of my other design work fairly well.  Again, I take the mirrored approach to the design and a fairly linear style.  These images are digital and the software layers the work, so that the line can float above the colour.

The first mermaid design I made, very linear very Beardsley inspired.

The hard work is the drawing itself.  I have with difficulty coloured scanned drawings in the past while using a mouse, but it's just impossible to draw with a mouse.  (I often forget how long ago I first learnt to use a mouse  and am often astonished that computer newbies find it so awkward to use them - and then I remember.)

These designs were drawn using a drawing tablet, which facilitates a more natural approach to a digital image, and allows control at every stage of the procedure.  You still lose a tiny amount of the spontaneity of a drawing on paper but it's worth it after you've experienced the problems of trying to 'clean up' a scanned drawing.

Quite difficult to get the sweep of the body and tail properly drawn to my satifaction, and again its cramped up there.  I had to carefully scale the figures so they appeared a pleasing size, but not too small.  Nor did I want a 'my little pony' feel to them, where characters have pink, green and blue hair and big googly eyes.  (even if that would make them more successful).  I was thinking again about those illustrators I mentioned at the beginning for inspiration, often artists from the Art Nouveau period used a highly decorative style, a step between painting and illustration that I've always liked.

An elongated approach to the figure.

When I work at decorative line and patterning I always have the work of Aubrey Beardsley in mind, and although the Rhine maidens he drew for his 'Comedy of the Rhinegold' may not be mermaids exactly, I'm sure they're a distant branch of the same family tree.  Of course, Beardsley almost never used colour in his work (I think with one exception) and therefore I can't look to him for inspiration there, but his wide ripple of influence did catch no lesser artist than Gustav Klimt.

Beardsley's Rhine maidens, I like their billowing hair.

I loved the work of Klimt when I was about seventeen, and studied it very closely.  I learned a huge amount about drawing and painting, and the basic use of colour from Klimt and I still find his influence appearing in my work today even when I'm not concious of it.  With the image below, I was thinking of his painting 'Goldfish'.

A Klimt like mermaid - via 'Goldfish' - with maybe a little Art Deco thrown into the mix.

Again, I'm not sure if the women in Klimt's painting can be exactly termed mermaids, (I'm not going to reproduce it here as I'm concerned about copyright problems) for they appear to have legs, - the painting shows a large goldfish, embossed with gold leaf and in the foreground a young woman sticks her large moon arse out in the viewers direction.  (I can't imagine why that appealed to a seventeen year old!) while behind her other 'mermaids' cavort.  I suppose with their legs they can only be thought of as 'aquatic females'.

My image tries (in less time) to give something of the style of the Klimt piece, while also keeping a little of Beardsley's decorative line approach.  I like a good mix.

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Gargoyles a go go

A Gargoyle spokesperson yesterday.  (Wikipedia commons)

A little while back I hit on the idea of gargoyles as a perfect Impspace design, as an image they’re almost ready made.  A strange medieval monster hanging from the side of a building, and the design lends itself to being doubled over.  Wonderful.

 Well, I gave it a try, and I was mildly surprised that I couldn't get it to work to my satisfaction.  Below was one of the feeble results, and as you can see, it never got to the stage of being coloured, or of even being finished.  I must have sensed early on that this was going nowhere fast and abandoned it.

You had your chance - dammed whiny gargoyle.

I left this idea lying on my hard-drive for a while and began to work on other designs, but eventually came back to it and took another look.

I needed a more comic feel; that grimacing mouth might have been accurate but failed to lighten the mood.  After all, what's wrong with a smile?  Just because you've sat on a Cathedral for seven hundred years frightening away evil spirits (not to mention channeling away rain water) that's no reason not to have a bright happy and carefree attitude.

I began to doodle with the basic image, trying to make it funnier, worked on the jaw and mouth so it was less human and more dog like, changed the body shape and began to think of the building it would be sitting on.  I'd always intended it to be leaning out from a plinth or wall, with some gothic like architecture somewhere in the design.

Some sketch ideas for the new gargoyle.  I like the one on the right, he seems almost ecstatically happy

A lot of my designs are doubled over.  I mean the image is mirrored with slight changes made (sometimes) to vary the effect.  I just like symmetry in designs, and so I knew from the start that the finished image would be a mirrored image.  It was a tight squeeze getting both of them into the picture along with some architectural detail as well.  I needed a Cathedral feel for the finishing touch and wanted flying buttresses and fancy carved detail, but I soon realised that wasn't going to happen as everything was too cramped.  Here's the first image I finished.

Gargoyles - they really know how to have a good time!

And as you can see, everything has tended to go upwards in a kind of block of masonery, when I had originally wanted great arches and 'thin' details.  Not to worry, I still like the finished image.

I still wanted some spires though, you can't have gargoyles without Cathedral's and you can't have Cathedral's without spires.  So I had another bash at it, keeping those spires in mind and came up at last with this.

At last, I have those spires!

It's a different effect, because of the mainly white background, but they're consistant, and I'm glad they're in a different kind of position which helps the two images in comparison.  I like them, my only problem is they're a little drab because - well they're made of stone.

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Escher on the cheap.

This was an experiment in creating a winged imp tesselation.

I’ve always liked the prints of M C Escher, for their beauty, and complexity, but have always found them a little daunting as a model to emulate.  Escher always stated that he knew nothing about science or maths, but I think that this was modesty or at best, a half-truth.

Now I really am somebody who knows nothing about maths (I’m not bragging, just being honest) and looking at some of the concepts that apparently appear in his prints are enough to make a numerical numbskull like me flee for the hills.

Escher is all about measurement, precision and detail, and although a conventional artist usually has more than enough of these things in their work, the amount of it in Escher's, pushes it into the extraordinary.

For my Zazzle site, I wanted to design something that gave me the 'feel' of Escher, without any of that fiddly measurement, precision and detail stuff - in fact I wanted Escher 'on the cheap', or maybe that might be better expressed as 'speedy Escher.'

Another imp tesselation experiment, combining three different representations.

I did a lot of drawing on paper, trying to get my shapes to add up into tesselations that worked and found it to be a pretty thankless task.  In the above experiment I think it fails because they aren't full figures as Escher would have done, but partial forms.

A lot of his work revolves around interlocking elements.  These are quite hard to achieve, each element of the design has to interlock with all others without any change.  The whole can have a number of different shapes, but they have to be designed so that they all interlock perfectly with each other in a repeating pattern.  Tricky.

Another reason I think it fails is that the above experimental tesselation can be seen as one element, and I don't remember ever seeing Escher combine many figures onto one element.  His elements are always a single human or animal figure.  I suppose there are no hard and fast rules, but it still seems like cheating.

The above element, combined into a full scale tesselation.

Another approach I tried was a tesselation of a number of rider figures, and I chose as the theme a man riding a dragon.  Here you see a black line drawing of one element.

A single element of the tesselation of my Dragon Rider design.

If you're familier with Escher's work you'll recognise that this is based on one of his prints called 'horsemen'.  His work is not just a tesselation, but also approximates a moebius strip, a mathematical body constituting a strip in the form of a loop with a half turn.  The resulting loop has only one side and one edge.  Clever, and not something I'm going to be attempting any time soon.  Here's the finished tesselation.

The full tessalation of the Dragon Riders.

Apart from the fact that the dragons all look as if they're humping one another, this design suffers from the same problems.  Two figures on the same element, and the dragon design is a little awkward. 

As I said earlier in the post I wanted a feel of Escher's work, but quicker; for me tesselations are too time consuming and I don't think my results are as good as I want, so I began working towards a look -  something that suggested Escher and had something (I hope) of their charm.

First up we have a roundel that originated as a one figure design for a t-shirt, a strong colourful image that could be seen across a room.  I combined it into this roundel, and liked the effect so much, I began to look at other designs I could use in the same way.

An Imp roundel.

I especially designed this next image as a roundel, and found even this was quite tricky to pull off, as each figure had to be positioned carefully to get the swords in the right place.

Another six politicians in the making.

Their feet had to be on the red ring only, I didn't want them overlapping too much into the central part, and of course their tails had to go under and over each others swords.  Not as complex as a tesselation but it had its moments.


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