Inktober 2016 1 - Mice in Space

I've neglected this blog for a while, which means that there's a backlog of images from last year's inktober. 

This first batch consists of various animals dressed as astronauts. There are two reasons for this: firstly, my colleague Rob Maslen wrote a story about a mouse in space. Secondly, I asked my daughter for a list of suggestions of things to draw when I was stuck for ideas... 

This final image is, in fact, the first animal astronaut picture I drew as a response to Rob's story....

Carly Raptor Jepson & the Mozzasaurus: Jurassic Sexual Politics

This is my last regular post for the summer. I'm hoping to get back to blogging the results of my experiences in translating the short stories of the French writer, Villiers de l'Isle Adam here.

My obsession with dinosaurs has already featured on this blog. This may be the result of a traumatic experience watching Jurassic Park in 1993 and having to hide under a cardigan with my sister. A sucker for punishment, back in July I went to see Jurassic World with my friend and colleague, Rob Maslen. Rob is a Renaissance man - he started his academic career writing about Elizabethan Prose, but has switched his gaze to fantasy in recent years. Having run a highly popular undergraduate course in this subject he is now offering the first Masters degree in the UK on fantasy.* 

He is also excellent company at the cinema. The image below is a result of our post film chat about the sexual politics of Jurassic World as we worked out the parallels between Bryce Dallas Howard’s character (starts the movie pent-up in stiff white suit, has to be thawed by ultra male, Chris Pratt) and the velociraptors (an all female team, who start the movie pent-up in a cage, until released by ultra male Christ Pratt). Hence my concern about how the velociraptors would feel after such a wild first date:

In comparison, I don't think this picture of a Mozzasaurus needs much explanation: 

* I made this picture for publicity materials to go with the course and am hoping to collaborate with Rob in the near future:

My Dickensian upbringing

One odd thing about my sister's public career is the way that strangers feel able to speculate groundlessly about our family. Wikipedia seems to think that we grew up in a castle with a butler. It is true, however, that we did have a privileged upbringing. As white middle-class children we were privileged as white middle-class children are in our unequal society. An awareness of such inequalities and a desire to do something about them led to my sister's involvement in the Labour party. But we were also very privileged in one particular respect: we had liberal and imaginative parents who encouraged and supported us in what we did. And they still do. 

So, of course, I've drawn silly pictures of them for birthday cards and Christmas presents. These are insufficient reflections of the love and gratitude that both my sister and I feel towards two wonderful people. 

 Proof that our father is a Renaissance man...

Sound and furiosa, siblifyng ...?

It’s hard living in the shadow of a more famous and more talented sibling, but my sister seems to cope. I've written about pictures I've made for her before. From time to time, I still try to keep up her spirits by drawing a picture of her as Boba Fett (this seems to have boggled the Daily Mail)*

or Tank Girl: 

or Imperator Furiosa from the recent Mad Max film:

Apparently she’s been busy over the last few months. Something to do with a deputy?

*Thanks to the Daily Mail, by the way, for totally failing to ask permission to reproduce that image.

You don't need a weatherman...

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

I spotted these rowers whilst watching the brilliant ‘Matt Berry does .. The Boat Race’. 

So I took screen shots and used them for practice in producing caricatural faces.

A couple of years ago, I tried something similar with a page of photos showing headshot of people auditioning to be weather forecasters. Unfortunately my browser reports that the site with these photos now carries malware, but a google search for 'weather forecaster auditionees' brings up the basic images I was working from.

Procreat-ions

A short post this week, as I’ve been on holiday. As I grow older my attention span seems to diminish along with my patience for lengthy administrative meetings. One consequence is a tendency to doodle. This week’s images were put together over the past year ago during various meetings.* I used my iPad and an app called ‘Procreate’. It’s still, as far as I can tell, the fastest and most flexible drawing app that I’ve tried.** I’m afraid the images are not very achieved - I’m still experimenting with the technology.  And I have yet to find a way of taking advantage of the digital features (brushes, layers, textures etc.) that come with the app, rather than trying to reproduce what I would do with a pen or pencil. 

*These images also seem to provide evidence that some of my colleagues get as bored as I do.

**Even if I can't conceive of a worse name for an app ... apart from maybe 'Sexstick'.

Inktober Redux 2 - Jurassic Poets

As an undergraduate I once heard J.H. Prynne lecture on Wordsworth's 'Old Man Travelling' and for some reason, the experience has never left me. So naturally, when I was casting around for Inktober ideas, I decided to place the pursed-lipped Cambridge poet into a famous scene from Jurassic Park. 

Somehow this led to showing the then Oxford Professor of Poetry riding a triceratops over a nemesis (you can tell I never got past The Triumph of Time). 

Then it seemed obvious that Philip Larkin would only ride a diplodocus if Kingsley Amis came with him:

And this is Andrew Motion hiding from a Velociraptor, just because.* 

*If any editor wants to commission the 'Jurassic Poets' coffeetable book (or the colouring-in version for the younger dinophile fan of modern of poetry), do get in touch...

Inktober Redux: Blood on the Goose / Goose on the Tracks

It’s been well over a year since I last updated this blog: my job as a lecturer in English literature and my responsibilities as father to two young children barely leave me time to make drawings, let alone spend time blogging. However, I’m hoping to use the summer to bring this site up to date and put up - in a series of weekly posts - some of the images I’ve made since I last wrote.

A good place to start is with Inktober, since that was also the basis for the last post I managed on here. If you don't know what it is, Inktober is the creation of artist Jake Parker. The idea is that every day in October you make a picture using pen (or brush) and ink, rather than digital means, and then post it to twitter. During 2013, I only managed to participate in this a few times, but last October in 2014, I just about managed to complete one drawing in ink every day. This was exhausting and usually involved putting together something fairly derivative from reference material found via Google.  

Since I was tweeting these images, Twitter also served as a source of inspiration and I also cobbled together versions of photographs posted by individuals such as Richard Coles and Simon Day:

Young Richard Coles / Simon Day dressed up

And then, finally, a picture of Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg and a goose. 

The goose is there because of a long-standing joke with an old friend about the consequences of inserting the word ‘goose’ into Dylan lyrics (Subterrenean Homesick Goose, Goose of Spanish Leather etc.). Let’s just leave it there, shall we?

Fortunately, daddy tries to make things up

This is me being rescued by space mice.

A couple of months ago, I bought a copy of Neil Gaiman’s book Fortunately, the Milk on impulse. My children loved it, especially my five year old son. The premise for the book is that the narrator's father steps out to buy a pint of milk and then has to account to his children for the long time he is absent at this task. He spins them a tale of having been kidnapped by aliens and captured by pirates before being rescued by a time-travelling dinosaur called Professor Steg, who whisks him off on further adventures in his time-machine before dropping him back at the house. Fortunately, the milk survives all these adventures (and even aids in a couple of time-paradox scrapes) and the father produces it as material proof that he has been telling the truth.

I've borrowed Chris Riddell's picture of the Galactic Dinosaur Police from Philip Ardagh's review of the book for the Guardian: here. If it infringes copyright, or any interested parties want me to take it down, just let me know via @keatsandchapman

It’s a nice piece of whimsy with some Douglas Adams / Terry Pratchett riffs on the fantastic characters encountered by the narrator (a one-eyed God named Splod, inter-galactic dinosaur police etc.). All this is accompanied by some fine illustrations by Chris Riddell in the UK edition and Skottie Young in the American edition. 

I haven’t seen the American edition, so don’t know how Skottie Young’s artwork compares with Chris Riddell. I’m intrigued by this decision: it’s not unusual for employ different illustrators on different sides of the Atlantic, sometimes because the same book will be published by different publishers or outlets of the same firm. But in the UK edition of the book, at least, text and illustration overlap and there are, for example, separate portraits of characters from the story in the endpapers. So the different editions must be very different books, even if only in minor details.

As noted, my son loved the book, but this had consequences I hadn’t foreseen. Shortly after we finished reading the book as a bedtime story, I was walking him to school after dropping his sister at nursery and he started asking me in a very pointed way what I had been doing whilst I was away from him. At his prompting, I started making up a convoluted story of my own - like the narrator’s father in Fortunately the Milk it turned out that I had been waylaid by aliens (Cat Aliens) and rescued by Space Mice whilst the Cat Aliens fought it out with some Dogs from Outer Space. And I ended up doing the same for next few days, spinning out our walk to school with free-falling, circular stories, that all ended up the same way: Professor Steg would pick me up in her time-machine and get me back home in time for our walk to school.

This is one of the Cat Aliens who kidnapped me.

I learned two things from this experience: firstly, I love making up stories for my son, largely because of the obvious pleasure he derives from having stories told to him ; secondly, I lack invention - only two days in, I was ripping off H.G. Wells' The Time Traveller for plot lines and baddies.* My admiration for writers like Gaiman, who make up new stuff all the time grew with each day I struggled to come up with something. 

This is the arch-enemy of the Space Cats, a Dog from Outer Space

The pictures I've posted here were all I managed in my attempt to keep up with Jake Parker's 'Inktober' exercise. My day job doesn't leave as much time as I'd like for drawing, especially since October is the middle of term, sigh.

* Don't ask me why, Dr Freud, but I always seemed to end up in an underground cave ...

From Sherlock to Sidlock

This is an old picture, put together over the summer and left to languish on my hard drive in the hope that I would find inspiration to do something more with it.

The origin of the image was a discussion with a smart Masters student about her dissertation project, in which she planned to look at various recent representations of Sherlock Holmes, from Guy Ritchie's films to the Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat adaptations for television. She was particularly interested in the role of the male gaze (as described by Laura Mulvey) in relation to the character of Irene Adler and her argument was partly inspired by a recent blog post on the topic.

I re-watched 'Scandal in Bohemia' (from the Gatiss/Moffat series) in preparation for our supervision: the episode was the source of controversy over whether Moffat's presentation of a modern Adler was sexist and my student took the line that the effects of the male gaze were sexist. I too find the sexual politics of the final moments of the episode disappointing, but feel that it is disappointing exactly because of the subtle and varied way the episode is about gazing, looking and reading. This runs from Adler's surveillance of Sherlock at the start of the episode, to the way in which Sherlock's powers of deduction are rendered as text superimposed upon our view of whatever object he is looking at. The ending is disappointing (Sherlock steps in to rescue a humbled and humiliated Adler from certain death) because it papers over previous qualms in the episode about whether Sherlock can actually read things accurately and whether his ability to read things is compromised by his lack of sexual articulacy (through his relationship with Adler) and his poor emotional skills (through his treatment of Molly).*

Right up to those last two minutes, it seemed to me a thoughtful episode, full of visual parallels and smart effects that examined men trying to exercise power through the way they look at things (if that's what the male gaze is) and the anxieties that perplex them as a result. Ho hum.

I left the picture languishing over the summer in the hope that I would think of something more witty to put in the text part of my drawing and because I was hoping that I would have time to improve on the 'Sidlock' image below - derived from Benedict Cumberbatch once pointing out his similarity to Sid from the Ice Age films.

This was an experiment with colouring a line drawing electronically with Sketch Book Pro. I need to work on how I capture the line drawing and then implement the colouring. Still, it shows what I had in mind...

*I should probably acknowledge that the havering over Sherlock's articulacy on sexual and emotional matters extends to his relationship with John Watson, but I gather the writers of fan fiction have it covered.

Sneezy Pandas

This is a dry run for some ideas about the use of visual irony in picture books for young children that I’m going to incorporate into a lecture for the course on Children’s Literature that I’ve started teaching this semester. My starting point is Chu’s Day, a picture book written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Adam Rex, that was published earlier this year. I bought a copy for my own children and demand was such that for a few days it became regular reading as a bedtime story in our house.

The book tells the story of a young panda, Chu. In the first half of the book he visits a library and then a diner with one of his parents. His parents fear that he is going to sneeze, but he doesn’t. In the second half of the book Chu goes to the circus with both parents who become so absorbed in the spectacle that they fail to notice that he is about to sneeze. When he does sneeze it brings the whole circus down. At the close of the book, Chu declares that was ‘a sneeze all right’, as he is put to bed.

(My son enjoying a panda sneeze.)

Like many picture books and stories for young children, Chu's Day depends upon various kinds of repetition: when Chu sneezes, for example, the devastating effects are shown upon the diner and the library that he had visited in the first half of the book. But the whole book hinges upon a repetition (the non-sneezes), followed by breaking that repetition (the devastating sneeze). Another well-known example of this effect in a children's book, would be The Gruffalo: after scaring each would-be predator, the mouse laughs ‘there’s no such thing as a Gruffalo’, but this becomes ‘There’s no such thing as the Gruffal-Oh!’ on the third repetition, with the appearance of the Gruffalo himself.

O help O no it's a Gruffalo! 

My children very much enjoyed the humour of this variation in a repetition, and the play upon expectations in the first half of the book. They loved the way that Chu fails to sneeze - a full page of Chu about to sneeze (‘aah … aaah … aaaah’) followed by Chu on a single page with a curt ‘no’. My daughter was especially taken with this - although she loved soundscape of the book as whole, and started anticipating expletives (‘oops’ and ‘yup’) after only one reading of the book. I have a theory that the break with expectations (‘aah … aaah … aaah … No!’) was a rehearsal for her of a kind of agency that children don’t often enjoy in their relationships with adults. Parents spend a lot of time setting limits, so the vicarious enjoyment of Chu’s ‘no’ becomes a chance to participate in a refusal of adult expectations without consequences. Well, it’s a theory.

Like all good children's books there's a lovely interaction between the material rhythms of language in the text and the detail of the illustrations. Adam Rex alternates between pages where background details are carefully excluded and lush full-page spreads (of the diner, the library and the circus). But the detail I’m most interested in is a small one: on nearly every page of the book, there is a snail. He (?snails are hermaphrodites, I think?) plays no roll in the narrative and appears most prominently on one of the final pages, where s/he is sitting on the Daddy Panda’s hat as Chu’s parents put him to bed, reproduced here.*

My children spotted the snail very quickly on that page, then took delight in pointing him/her out on the previous pages on subsequent readings. The snail belongs to a form of visual irony that I’ve started to associate with picture books for children. Over and over again, in reading picture books with my children, I’ve begun noting small visual details of this kind that push the images beyond the simple rendering in pictorial terms of a text. Sometimes these details are extraneous to the plot (think of the numerous onlooking animals in Axel Scheffler’s picture books); sometimes such details become the plot: in Shirley Hughes’ Alfie Lends a Hand, for example, the central character takes steps to resolve the central dilemma two pages before they are described in the text (this is going to be the starting point for my lecture). 

My theory is that the appeal of such details lies in the sense they give of narrative plenitude - they intimate a world in such picture books beyond the text and beyond the central narrative. But the pleasure may also lie in an associated form of agency (again): the child reading the book becomes active in creating a story that is not necessarily dictated by the text. But  - heaven knows whether or not I'm right - it's just a theory. I’m pretty innocent of critical writing about picture books at the moment (there’s still 3 weeks before I have to formalise this in a lecture). All I know for sure right know is that my children enjoy the books.

* Rather than violate anyone’s copyright, I’ve sketched a version of part of this scene. That's the snail in the top right, above the snazzy hat the Daddy panda wears. The book (which I clearly recommend) is readily available to purchase if you want to see it for yourself.

Epilogue and Update

Since drafting this, I've discovered a blog post by Neil Gaiman about the book's genesis: I've been reading his stuff since I was 16 and drew the picture below (in effect, an embarrassing piece of fan art) sometime last year in response to a comment somewhere about his ‘crazy hair’ (the subject of another picture book by Gaiman I’ve yet to read). If I get a chance, I’ll write up my son’s response to yet another of his books Fortunately the Milk - a different and involved story, with space cats.

Sketchbook

I haven't posted here for a while, but have still been active sketching. I try and draw something every day, to keep my eye in and because I find it helpful for my precarious sanity. These days, I don't have a lot of spare time, so I've taken to drawing my children during one of the few points in the day when they're bound to sit still: the 15 minute period of 'watching' before bath time, as part of their bedtime ritual.

The results are variable and a bit rushed (it's not easy drawing a portrait when you have only the length of an episode of the Octonauts) and I haven't posted them before because I'm wary of putting images of my children up on the internet. My solution is to post them here as a series of Vine videos of the sketchbook.

The sketchbook is a small square journal, made by hand.book which I used because the paper is more absorbent than ordinary moleskine sketchbooks, which I usually use and to which I've since returned.

In some of the sketches I've added washes using a water brush, pre-filled with made-up watercolour - I stole this idea from Dan Berry's excellent blog.

The sketches here cover a period from the 28 July to 10 October 2013. If you look closely, you may be able to spot a rapidly snatched portrait of Chris Ware whilst waiting (2 hours!) for him to sign a copy of Building Stories at the Edinburgh Book Festival.

More Fraternal Nonsense

I've written about this before here, but my sister is a serious person - an elected representative for her North London community, no less - and so, from time to time, I will draw her a picture of the Killer Wombat.

In view of the recent news about Ben Affleck's casting as Batman in a forthcoming Superman film (which has apparently caused uproar amongst fans), I thought it would be timely to update my previous allusion to his career as a superhero:

Post Script: And, erm, here are the wombats ... First they look all cute:

and then they reveal their true nature:

 ... I can't remember what this was about ... sorry, internet.

Don't let the pigeon bug the impressionist

One of the pleasures of being a father is reading to your children and one of the associated pleasures of reading to your children is discovering new books and authors to read to them.* I had never heard of Mo Willems until my wife returned from a trip to New York with Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, but our son took to it straight away. The premise is simple - the bus driver has to take a break and whilst he is away, we're under strict instructions not to let the pigeon drive the bus, however much he pleads ('your Mom would let me!'). My son took this lesson so much to heart that it is only very recently that he has stopped running up to pigeons in order to shout 'No!' (This sight was heartbreakingly cute when he was 2 - or stomach-churning, if you're a heartless cynic).

Willems, it turns out, is closely associated with Sesame Street, has won tonnes of awards (Caldecott, Carnegie) and has written lots of stuff. He has a good ear for simple dialogue, a smart sense of humour with sufficient appeal to adults to get you through inevitable multiple-readings-in-a-row and finds great expressive range in a deceptively plain-looking drawing style.

If you own copyright to this and want me to remove it - just let me know!

After the pigeon book, we graduated to 'Knuffle Bunny', the traumatic tale of a goggle-eyed girl called Trixie and her lost stuffed toy, and included 'Time to Pee' in our potty-training: it comes with mouse stickers, an excellent incentive (or 'bribe') for successful toilet-action. And recently we've acquired 'Knuffle Bunny Too', a sequel including the excellent (and, for us, resonant) line: 'Daddy tried to explain what 2.30am means'. Our children have taken to the iPad (in strictly controlled increments) and 'Don't Let the Pigeon Run this App' has been a great success: it is one of the few genuinely interactive apps for kids out there, allowing children to generate their own story by recording words that become incorporated into the narrative. Then, of course, they get to shout 'No!' a lot too. And there are still lots of books by him that we haven't got around to you.

Anyhoo, I mention all this because Willem's pigeon sprung immediately into mind when my friend, the historian CabinetRoom101 posted this picture of Monet and his wife on his twitter feed:

(I'm pretty sure he found it on the excellent Retronaut site.) Having posted a jokey tweet, I had to explain to CabinetRoom101, or Tim, as I prefer to call him, what I was talking about and then I couldn't resist a little doctoring. I meant to stop here:

But got carried away and wound up producing this:

Willems, I think, uses Adobe Illustrator or some such to produce the clever mixture of flat shapes and carefully scrappy lines, but I knocked this up on my iPad and then put it together using Pixelmator, so it's a bit rough in places.

Post Script: this is The Pigeon as drawn by my son, using the iPad app (heartless cynics, get stuffed):

*Other pleasures include, of course, that vicarious vampiric relish in your child's delight in story and the re-discovery of old favourites (hello Mr Gumpy! The tiger drank all of daddy's beer??)
** Other discoveries include the amazing Emily Gravett and Polly Dunbar (I love Penguin).

Sketchbook

For family reasons, I'm out of the country without access to a scanner. So I've put together a rather shaky flickr set of photos from my iPhone of a sketchbook that I started here. I wish I could say that I drew something in it everyday, not simply out of pride, but because my life has been immeasurably better on those occasions when I have managed to set aside a little time every day to draw something.

Here is the cover photo:



And this link produces a slideshow (I hope - I still haven't figured out how to embed this properly):



By way of explanation of the odd, disparate things in this: A bald caricature of Neil Gaiman for a post that maybe I'll put up one day; my son's birthday list; attempts at sketching during the American presidential debates; a list of French vocabulary from reading 'Contes Cruels' by Villiers de l'Isle Adam; various animal sketches requested by my children; a series of sketches responding to an amazing set of photographs of would-be weathermen (and women); copies of portraits of Verlaine and Rimbaud as preparation for a set of blog posts that may one day manifest in the form of readings of French poetry / English responses to French poetry accompanied by pictures. And so on. I've left in the pages scribbled on by my children, because it's a working document.

Fry Up

A couple of days ago, I clicked through a link from a post on Twitter about a caricature of Stephen Fry that had been drawn on an iPad, using the Adonit Jot Touch stylus. I've been curious about the Adonit Jot styluses since I read about them somewhere a while back (I think they were the object of a Kickstarter campaign). Their defining feature is a transparent circular disc at the tip of the stylus, which is presumably part of the the touch capacitive bit, since I gather that you need to generate a certain amount of surface area contact with the iPad screen in order to register with the device. The point of the Adonit transparent tip is that it allows you to see the point of contact with the screen and thus see more precisely where you're drawing.
In my own experiments with drawing on the iPad, I've stuck with the the Wacom stylus that I bought, mostly because I shelled out money for the bloody thing (it wasn't that cheap) and because the tip on the Adonit stylus looked a bit too delicate for our household (with two children under four years) and prone to breakage. When I heard about the 'Jot Touch' though, my curiosity was piqued, since it claims to allow you to vary the pressure when you're sketching: one big drawback with drawing on the iPad is the lack of pressure sensitivity. The app I use, 'procreate,' has some capacity to vary the thickness of stroke depending on how quickly you move the stylus, but I've found this hard to control to any useful degree. I'm very much enjoying figuring out how to paint on the iPad, but regret some of the flexibility and control that comes with using physical media.*
The caricature of Fry reminded me of my own juvenile effort for Broadsheet, fifteen years ago (gulp) and I posted a tweet that said as much (although, unsurprisingly, got no reply from Stephen Fry). I'm not sure the original was a good (or nice) joke about Fry's difficulties at the time, but it was my second attempt at caricature, I think (the first being a very crude rendition of Quentin Tarentino to accompany a review of 'Pulp Fiction') and I thought the likeness reasonable and was very pleased with.
So, the point of this rambling post is that I had another go, revisiting my original parody of Fry's 'Smooth Bar-steward' ads for Heineken. I've posted the painting I made on the iPad at the top and posted below an inked version of the pencil sketch I used as the basis for the iPad version (apologies for the poor quality - I don't have access to a scanner under present conditions) for comparison. For some reason, I think the inked version is a better likeness than the digital painting.

* Actually, the blog posting and video on the Adonit site is disappointing when it comes to unveiling the effects and advantages of the touch-sensitive version of their stylus. Nothing about varying line thickness, just a bit of warble about building colour. BIG HINT: If Adonit want to send me one for free, I'd be happy to put it through its paces (at $99 I can't afford to buy one) and blog about it extensively!