He stayed in his walk to watch a typesetter
neatly distributing type (Ulysses - Ch.6)
This is the post about how I put together the Gruffamookse image from last week. I'm writing this largely because my experiences with taking
evening classes at the Glasgow School of Art have made me more reflective about process - a good thing, I think.
Firstly, materials. For family reasons, I'm living away from home for six months in Waco, Texas. This means that I don't have access to a lot of the materials that I would normally use. However, I'm lucky in that I recently invested in
an iPad 3 (with the high resolution 'Retina' screen) and I have a laptop with
Photoshop Elements on it, for manipulating the images I create with the iPad. I also have a trusty
moleskine notebook and the pencils and pens I could fit into my bag.
I started by sketching out the basic images of the Gruffalo / Wyndham Lewis crossover and the Schefflerised-Joyce in my notebook. Then I photographed these images into the iPad and started work on them with an app called '
procreate'. I've tried a few drawing apps on the iPad over the past couple of years and, whilst it has a rubbish name, 'procreate' is by far and away the quickest and smoothest to use and it has a good range of tools. So I imported these images:
Then started work on them. First I traced the pencil image onto a top layer using an 'ink' brush. Throughout, I used a
Wacom Bamboo Stylus, which handles really well. The only problem is that it isn't pressure sensitive: the app allows you to vary thickness of line using the speed of your brushstroke, but that is a cumbersome and disjointed way of achieving effects (developers are apparently
working on pressure-sensitive styli for the iPad). I experimented a bit and found a brush that would more or less do what I want: Scheffler clearly works in ink, watercolour and a bit of gouache and I did find myself wondering whether I had created more work for myself my trying to reproduce this digitally instead of using similar materials myself. However when it came to colouring the images, the iPad was really useful and I was able to delete and make changes in a way that it is impossible when you're committing marks to hard copy. My basic pattern was to create a layer of base colour for most areas of the image and then work up detail in successive layers of colour. The first result was these isolated figures:
My plan was then to assemble them using Photoshop on the laptop. But the difficulties I encountered here, greatly increased my appreciation of Scheffler's original illustrations. One of the things I like about his work is the the depth and breadth of detail in his illustrations. I won't reproduce pages here, because I don't want to violate the copyright of his work, but there's a really intelligent rhythm to the way in which he moves between isolated details from a narrative and full-page scenes, including realised and detailed landscapes. We only have
The Smartest Giant in Town with us in Waco, but it is full of examples. As a side note, this is something that
the animated version of the Gruffalo brought to life really well - think of the way that the mouse's surroundings bristle with life (and death) as he passes through the 'deep dark woods'.
My own attempt to replicate this only revealed how bad I am this - how poorly thought out my images are when it comes to the whole composition. (My admiration for Scheffler's mise-en-page growing exponentially.) The result was a first image that I posted on twitter:
I then went back over what I'd done. The good thing about having created these images digitally, then turned out to be precisely that I could re-work them with relative ease rather than starting with scratch. I added the papal costume to my Gruffamookse:
Then spent some time figuring out (and admiring) the way that Scheffler draws trees, before coming up with the current image. It still needs some polish, but I do have another full-time career to work at (until someone spots that I've doing this rather than editing that volume ...).
