Shine a Light in the New Year

Inks and paints...

Cecilia is on a campaign to try and make me change my plan of not inking the comic and painting the pencils instead. She is quite insistent on the matter. What to do? An "artist" (I don't like applying this term to myself, but I haven't so far discovered an adequate English translation for "tekenaar", which I do feel I can call myself, despite not being a professional) like me, whose skills are rather limited, has to make the most of the things s/he is good at. So what am I good at? The first thing that springs to mind is "lines" and "inking". It's certainly not colour. Then why on earth would I cut out the inking? Well, for one thing, it takes ages - I ink very, very slowly. For another, I feel like my pencil originals are more lively than my inked versions. I tried to remedy that by using brush pens instead of my faithful Staedtler pens. But with brush pens, you can't draw the tiny details and microscopically smooth lines that I am so anal about. (Yes, I know, why fuss about that when there are still basics that I don't get right? Well, that's me for you.) So inking with brush pens would mean a) adapting my style and b) overcoming my fears. A third reason why I am inclined to dispense with inks is because I feel that stark black lines don't suit my story. I want something softer and more dreamy.

Now - I have recently done a picture for my sister, inked with two Faber-Castell PITT pens, one brush and one Small. It reminded me how much fun these pens are (even if they tend to lose their shape pretty quickly :/). It also reminded me that these exist in a wide variety of colours, so that I wouldn't have to use black. So this week I popped into one of the two art shops in my street and bought a handful of PITT pens in a variety of colours - Caput Mortuum, Warm Grey, Indian Red and Raw Umber. At first, I was a tad nervous about the fact that these colours only exist in brush pens, meaning that I haven't got a Small pen for details or corrections... But then I thought, what the heck, I'll just have to learn and adapt my inking to the brush like a big girl. Above is my first all-brush inked image, done with the Raw Umber pen.

The lady in the picture, as you can tell by the caption, is Florie. She is Gawain's second wife and the daughter of the Carl of Carlisle. The text of Sir Gawain and the Carl of Carlisle doesn't give her a name, so in a previous incarnation of the character I picked a random  Welsh one for her. In the meantime I have changed her name to Florie, which is a name traditionally associated with Gawain. It fits nicely, too, because the sons Gawain has with his second wife are called Florens and Lovell. Okay, Lovell is not so relevant here, but Florens can easily be the son of Florie, right? :-)

Anyway - this image is waiting to be coloured. I hope to get round to it soon.

This little portrait (postcard size) was drawn two weeks ago as an experiment. I wanted to try a combination of colour pencils (for the line art) and watercolour. So this was drawn with a purple pencil and then painted. It didn't work at all. The lines were too pale or not sufficiently defined or something - in any case, the image looked lousy. This may be partly because I used opaque paints - it's possible that the lines would have looked better if I had stuck to transparent ones. I started with a wash of Ceruleum Blue and some orange (made of Winsor Yellow and Permanent Carmine). That mixture produces a lovely, delicate tint (I think), but even though it's pale, it's not transparent. So it was probably not a good idea to use it for washing. In an attempt to save what I could of the image, I accentuated the lines with my Caput Portuum PITT pen, which turned it into something more or less acceptable. 

So what did I learn? Well, first off, I guess I shouldn't be using opaque paint in washes. And secondly, it might be a good idea to draw hair like Lot's in such a way that I can colour it in a more straightforward manner in the comic. I have to simplify it. 

...And a textured version, because the watercolour didn't live up to my hopes ;P.

The Test

Next experiment: simple and almost flat colours. There isn't a grey shade in sight - how often does that happen in my watercolours? I tried to forget most of the colour theories I have been pouring over recently and just paint. I did start off with layers of yellow wash before adding the other colours, so hopefully the image looks more unified than the last one :).

And look: it's not a portrait! It's an illustration! ;P Considering that I started this without any preliminary sketches (I just wanted an image to colour), I think the drawing is not too bad. I tried to stylise and to prioritise readability, doing my best to take Walt Stanchfield's lessons to heart.

PS: it's called "The Test" because it illustrates an episode in which Gawain completes his training and his teacher Conchobarre subjects him to the admission tests of the Fianna. That is why his hair is braided. Of course, to optimise the storytelling in this one, you should also see a few pursuers in the distance :).

CONCRIT = VERY WELCOME.

Morgana & Lucy: watercolour

I did my best to take this small painting Very Seriously. All the paints were mixed in advance, I thought about the contrast between warm and cold, I created my own blacks, I dried my brush regularly and I used a damp brush to blend different layers.I DID MY BEST. So this is probably as good as it gets at this moment. Mind you, I'm not at all sure whether my efforts actually show. Do they? (Please try the full view.)

I made a version with a Photoshop texture as well. It seems like I am drifting more and more towards traditional art + texture for the look of my Gawain illustrations. I like how this technique allows me to choose a paper with which I am comfortable and then add a textured, old-ish look afterwards.

I can't believe I've painted a cat. I see one around the house every day, and yet cats remain very difficult to draw for me. This particular cat is Lucifer (Lucy for short), Morgana's pet. I shiver at the thought of having to draw him for pages on end, but - well, I simply must have cats in my story. Here's to hoping my skills will improve :).

Princess-of-Shadows' textures

In which I try my hand at watercolour again...

I think I mentioned before that I would like to do the comic in pencils and watercolour instead of in inks as I originally intended. The reason for this is that I find that my sharp inked style does not suit my story very well. The tale has a dream-like quality that is better served with colour and pencils.There is only one snag: I am one lousy watercolour artist. I don't master the medium, for one thing. And I don't understand about colour, for another. Then again, I am very stubborn and not willing to admit defeat. I'll just keep trying.

The image below is an exercise - it is an idea I had for a possible back cover of The Darkest Hour. I added the text and frame in Illustrator, having discovered that it is so much more convenient for adding text than Photoshop. I haven't tried it yet, but I think I'm going to use Illustrator for lettering my pages too. It's much easier to draw speech bubbles with it than with Photoshop.

I discovered that adding texture in Photoshop can actually cheat people into thinking I had a half-decent watercolour to start with. But I am going to be very honest with you and show you the watercolour as it was before I started toying with it in Photoshop. As you can see, it's ... utterly incompetent. The dress went reasonably well - I like how it looks. But the contrast is not very good and the colours ... well, they don't clash, but they don't exactly spark either. I also did some damage with the masking fluid. I masked Ygraine's plaits and the contours of her figure when I added the dark washes. Not only are the dark washes a complete mess; as the masking fluid came off, it took some of the underlying paint with it and smeared the pencil lines. *sigh* So instead of having white hair with delicate blue-grey shadowing, Ygraine now has dirty grey plaits. I couldn't simply repaint because the paper had suffered as well.

This doesn't exactly bode well for my comic, does it? I have a LOT of work to do before I can tackle my pages with some confidence... I don't understand. It seems like everyone and their sister can paint with watercolour. Why do I find it so hard?

The above are two small, quick sketches of Gorlois. The bottom one was done  some time last year; the top one I did last night. Neither is good, and I completely ruined the top one with my clumsy attempt at shadowing the cloak. But they do illustrate where I am trying to go. Even if I did ruin it, I like the top one in its simplicity. I think - but goodness knows I may be wrong again - that I had better focus on painting as simply as possible, with few layers. And I'm doing my best to study colour.

Opinions and critiques are most welcome. 

NB: I have no idea why the "back cover" image has a green hue when you enlarge it. It seems like Flickr and Photobucket do something to my colours! 
ETA: Fixed! It was a CMYK image. Screens don't like that...

Pencil sketch: Kundry

Meet Lady Kundry, Gawain's third wife. She first appears in Chrétien de Troyes' Perceval, where she is not given a proper name but gets a few telling epithets instead, such as "l'Orgeuilleuse de Logres" or "la Mauvaise Pucelle". Apart from having the most alluring mouth in Christendom (as per Wolfram von Eschenbach), she also has a marvellously sharp tongue that she uses deftly to lash out at every knight she meets. She makes no exception for her future husband.

I thought she should have a proper name, so I gave her the one she has in Wagner's Parzival, even though the character in the opera is quite different from my version.

Obviously, I like Kundry an awful lot :).

Pencil sketch: Arthur

Here he is: the King Arthur you will eventually meet in my comic. The "classic" Arthur is often blond, but I like mine to look like a lion with a black mane :). (I really need to draw a silhouette in which the lion-like quality of his hairdo is more obvious - I'm rather fond of it...)

Clearly, when I say I want a simpler style and more stylised, I am not talking about my characters' hair. A few simple lines simply will not do in that department ;-). I am so doomed.

Another small pencil sketch

A small pencil drawing a week? Let's see if I can keep it up... It would be nice, and I would have a Moleskine full of nicely finished pictures. - I can dream, can't I? In any case, you can see the style I want to go for. I wouldn't colour the whole comic with pencils (I am enjoying the use of these pencils immensely, but colouring one A3-sized page with them would take a full week), but the pencilled line art is representative of what I want.

This is Lady Ragnell, by the way. She is Gawain's first wife. You are not due to meet her in the story very soon, since our hero has some growing up to do first, but doing character concept sketches tends to help me figure out my stories, so here she is already.

A small colour pencil sketch

I am swamped with work, so naturally I am experiencing an overpowering urge to DRAW. It is always like that: when I have time, I have no inspiration, and when I don't have time, all I want to do is work on the comic. What can I do? Here and there, I try to squeeze a small drawing in. This sketch is one. I treated myself to a new pocket Moleskine for my birthday and did this as an opener. The colours are brighter in reality, but colour pencils don't scan particularly well :/.

The second version has some Photoshop tweaking and I added a texture ("Psychosomatic", courtesy of Princess_of_Darkness). I find that I like the combination of colour pencils with this particular texture. Maybe I can do something with that in the design of the Gawain website...

I don't know if it is at all obvious, but I am trying out for a slightly different style - a more stylised one. I have tried to draw a little more realistically after having been told that one glance at my drawings suggests that my story is targeted towards children. But this increased realism, combined with my inks, doesn't please me at all. The story I have in mind is more poetic and expressive and dreamy than realistic. Sharp inks and attempts at realism don't suit it. So now I'm looking for a simpler drawing style, pencils instead of inks, and light touches of colour (I'm thinking watercolour, possibly with some colour pencils). This will take some experiment - I need to find out whether I can get the sort of effect that I am looking for, and whether the idea is at all realistic. I will keep you posted :-).

Gawain Project: The Sword of Kings 5-11

"Here, encompassed by Roman ramparts of earth and wood, the fate of Uther's kingdom was to be decided."

- Bernard Cornwell, The Winter King (1995)

Although I like spreading my posts a little, I am posting the rest of The Sword of Kings in one big instalment instead of the two I had originally planned. I think it is best: the comic is short and has no cliffhangers, and I do have it all ready. So today you get no less than seven pages - some sketchier than others, I should add :).

Constructive criticism is, as always, very welcome. I am thinking of drawing, inking and rendering this episode first by way of test, because I am not quite happy with the way my first inked TDH page looks, and since SoK is a short story, I can afford to experiment a little with it. But it would be great if I could get the layout right first.

In other news: I hope not to keep you waiting too long for the continuation of the story. I have been going over my general plot pages and noticed a) how much has changed since I typed them out a few months ago and b) the story is shaping up and making sense. The beginning needs some sorting out and I need to find my Schwung to get it going - but I think I am getting there (finally).

On to the comic, then!


What went before
Queen Ygraine has disappeared and Uther is desperate to get her back. He searches the land frantically but can find no trace of his wife. Having heard that Merlin currently resides in the forest of Cit Coit Caledon, he travels there to beg the wizard for help. He is met by the Giant Herdsman instead...

Ah, wonky perspective. It has become my trademark, wouldn't you say? ;P

Hope you enjoyed it a little, even if it was not much more than a bridge episode. Thank you very much for reading!

♥

Gawain Project: The Sword of Kings 1-4

"Jetzt, wo der gute Utepandragûn seinen Frieden hat... Er ist tapfer herumgeirrt, aber ich glaube kaum, daß er mich finden wollte. Das beruhte zwar auf Gegenseitigkeit, und doch, etwas weniger einig hätten wir uns diesmal schon sein dürfen."

- Adolf Muschg, Der rote Ritter (1993)

The comic is not dead. Whereas some future episodes are already getting a very definite shape, there is still a lot of sorting-out to do on others. One small step has been taken: a short bridge episode is ready. After three rewritings (you won't believe that when you see the result), I am glad that I can finally show you the eleven-page draft of The Sword of Kings. It is short, but not insignificant in the larger scheme of things.

You know the drill: constructive criticism is most welcome. I am very grateful for it and will certainly take it into account for the final version.

A few words about the current draft:
As per usual, I am posting layouts that I have been drawn on the train. They are by no means finished. The SoK drafts have been drawn with a ballpoint pen in a tiny notebook - less than half the size of the notebooks I used for TDH. That wasn't planned. I had been drafting in my usual notebooks, but I got stuck twice on the same plot element that I could not iron out. In the end, I simply didn't take my comic notebooks and pens with me anymore. But whaddayaknow, one day during a train ride I suddenly figured out how to go about it. The only notebook I had on me was tiny, but I could not possibly wait until I got home to write everything down.

The greatest drawback of the small notebook is that my handwriting is necessarily tiny, and therefore mostly illegible. So to make the layouts readable, I had to letter them digitally. The result looks very odd: you get sketchy drawings combined with neat computer lettering. I'm aware of how incongruent that looks, but I didn't have much of a choice :).

Now, on to the comic!


What went before
In The Darkest Hour, you could read how Uther Pendragon, High King of Britain, fell in love with another man's wife. He makes war on Gorlois of Cornwall and, with the help of the sorcerer Merlin, introduces himself into the castle where Lady Ygraine resides with her two daughters, Morgause and Morgana. Gorlois dies in battle and Ygraine cannot escape marrying Uther, whom she loathes. She bears the High King a son, but the child is given to Merlin as payment for his past services. Morgause and Morgana are given in marriage to King Lot and King Uriens, whose support Uther needs in his military efforts against the raiding Saxons. Then, finally, Ygraine finds someone who will help her take revenge: the mysterious sorcerer Klingsor. And so one night Uther wakes up to find his Queen gone...
(Need to re-read? You can do so here.)

This is how the story continues.

Tomorrow...

The Arthurian Review, Issue 5

A few months ago, I received a package in the mail. It came all the way from the States and contained a 104-year-old book – a 1906 reprint of an Edwardian bestseller. My friend Karina's SO had spotted it at a book mall, “sandwiched between Cajun Cookery and How to Clean Most Everything”, as she tells me, and rescued it. I am very grateful that he did so, because I did not know either the book or its author, and as it turns out, Uther & Igraine holds a few surprises.

Uther & Igraine (1903)

Warwick Deeping

It had been a while since I had last read a baroque Victorian novel, and it seems that I had all but forgotten what it is like. Reading the first few pages of Deeping’s prose was a little like receiving a blow to the head. I was dizzy with the overwrought imagery. Here is a taste:

“A wind cried restlessly amid the trees, gusty at intervals, but tuning its mood to a desolate and constant moan. There was an expression of despair on the face of the west. The woods were full of a vague woe, and of troubled breathing. The trees seemed to sway to one another, to fling strange words with a tossing of hair, and outstretched hands. The furze in the valley – swept and harrowed – undulated like a green lagoon.”

Mr Deeping (1877-1950), it is clear, likes his Aesthetes. He harnesses the worst affectations and most artificial phrasing of Wilde and Swinburne to write a romance novel. He adds positively lethal doses of alliteration and superfluous adjectives to the mix. In fact, his writing reminds me painfully of my own prose style :P. To do myself justice, I don’t insist on using “panier” when I could write “basket”, or “potage” instead of “soup”. Deeping does. As soon as I got used to it, I actually found his pedantry funny and went along with it.

Uther & Igraine is pure historical romance. When I say “historical”, I mean it in the widest possible sense. The story is set in what looks like post-Roman Britain, but the author adds all sorts of elements that evoke chivalry and courtly love and do not match the timeframe at all. Everything in this novel serves the romance. Characterisation, historicity and background: they are all (mostly cardboard) props to decorate the stage on which the Passionate and True Love of Uther and Igraine is shown. But if you can accept the novel for what it is, it is quite an enjoyable read, and much less silly than many of its modern counterparts.

“The true love of Uther and Igraine”? You heard it right. In Mists of Avalon, Uther is young and a hottie, and Igraine falls in love with him because her husband Gorlois is old and considerably less hot. Deeping’s scenario is somewhat different. In 1903, an adulterous love affair could not possibly have a happy ending, and happy endings are what romance novels are all about. The solution to this problem is to turn the source legend on its head. In Uther & Igraine, it is Gorlois who calls upon Merlin to trick Igraine into marrying him when he finds that she is not responsive to his advances. (This despite the fact that he has such romantic notions of wooing, including stalking his beloved, manhandling her, and showing her a lot of crucified Saxons.) If Igraine rebuffs Gorlois, it is not only because he is vain, cruel and insensitive, but also because, just before, she has fallen in love with the mysterious Pelleas. That intensely honourable, valiant and (quite maddeningly) devout knight turns out to be none other than Prince Uther. Igraine and Pelleas part, due to an unfortunate misunderstanding, and do not meet again until after Gorlois has perpetrated his dastardly deed. In the service of the happy ending, the Duke of Cornwall eventually pays for his awful treatment of the heroine by kicking the bucket (forcefully) and leaving Uther free to marry his widow with a clear conscience.

My little summary might lead you to assume that Igraine spends the entire novel playing the part of damsel in distress. If it is true that she has to suffer violence, trickery and death threats, it should nevertheless be mentioned that she is also a brave girl with a sharp tongue who is not content to let other people decide her fate. She fires arrows at Saxons, lies and tricks, jousts if she has to – no, she is no wilting lily. Of course she becomes “as a child” when Pelleas is near, and she goes insane at one point, as Victorian conventions demand, but in general she is rather more emancipated than her sisters in the pseudo-feminist Arthurian novels of the 1990s. Take that, Rosalind Miles!

Should you feel like reading this cute, quirky little romance, I am happy to report that it is widely available in digital form on the Internet.

On the Gawain-o-meter:

Zero! There is no trace of Gawain, which is not surprising seeing as Igraine is very young and has no children yet. If there is neither a Morgause nor an Anna, there is not going to be a Gawain either. I have no idea how Deeping envisions Arthur’s family tree.

To prove how much fun I had reading this book, I doodled three characters while on the train. Please note that Morgan is not Morgan le Fay – she is Morgan la Blanche, who does not seem to have a counterpart in the source legend (or not that I can see).

The Arthurian Review, Issue 4

(CONTAINS SPOILERS for both seasons)

Merlin Season One

Merlin Season Two

I discovered the BBC series Merlin when it was already halfway Season Two. The first episode I saw, The Sins of the Father, immediately made me curious for more. I ordered the first box set and liked that well enough to get the second one, too. Now, while all Merlin fans are anxiously awaiting Season Three, I’d like to share a few thoughts. Those thoughts are a mixed bag, really. That is because on the one hand, I find Merlin very enjoyable, but on the other, I find it rather disappointing. I guess the mixture of shortcomings and enjoyment qualify it as something of a guilty pleasure.

Merlin features many familiar characters from Arthurian legend, but places them in a kind of alternate universe. Merlin is the same age as Arthur, and Arthur is being raised by his father, King Uther, instead of by a foster-father appointed by Merlin. (One unfortunate consequence of this is that the series must do without the delightfully sarcastic character of Sir Kay – no foster-father for Arthur means no foster-brother either.) True to the original legend, Morgana is Uther’s ward; but in the series she, too, is about the same age as Arthur. In an interesting twist, Guinevere is Morgana’s servant, and after all the well-known images of a blonde Guinevere, it comes as a surprise that the BBC series’ Once and Future Queen has African roots.

Merlin’s Camelot is a land ruled by a king who fanatically opposes magic. Uther prosecutes witches, wizards and magical creatures ruthlessly. This poses a bit of a problem for Merlin, a prodigious magical talent who must conceal his powers if he wants to keep his head. To complicate matters, Merlin is made a servant to Prince Arthur, in which capacity he is constantly under Uther’s nose. Discretion is advised. So naturally, in every episode some magical threat manifests itself that can only be stopped by means of Merlin’s own magic.

The ties between Merlin and the legends to which the main characters’ names refer are really rather thin. If you feel inclined to be critical, you might well ask why the writers choose to call their characters Merlin, Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot and Morgana if they are going to be barely recognisable as the figures of legend. The makers are not filming their own version of Arthurian legend; they are making a fantasy series with Arthurian touches. The best comparison I can think of is with J. K. Rowling’s use of myth and legend in Harry Potter. It’s not deep, it’s not particularly meaningful, but it adds some couleur locale and it’s fun if you get it. This is something you have to accept in order to enjoy the show.

Merlin is an enjoyable show but doesn’t withstand scrutiny. Maybe what I miss most is a clear creative vision. Shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Kaamelott are driven by a creator who knows very well where the characters are going and who write episodes that serve the development of those characters. There are themes and larger arcs that give structure to each season. For Buffy, Joss Whedon worked with a small army of writers, but each script would be submitted to him to ensure that it was consistent with his vision and coherent within the whole. A season of Merlin, on the other hand, seems to consist merely of 13 loose episodes. This is even more the case for Season Two than it was for Season One. Whereas interesting issues and plot points may be brought up within an episode, more often than not these elements will be buried by the end of the episode, let alone that there would be a sign of continuity in the next. One blatant example is of Morgana vociferously disowning Uther in Episode 11. Despite the fact that Uther does not take very will to this kind of behaviour, Episode 12 still finds Morgana living quietly in Uther’s castle and telling Morgause that she “has to pretend to be Uther’s loving ward”. I don’t see a lot of pretending anymore, but that might just be me.

Likewise, there seems to be a sad lack of ideas among the script writers. Twice now, Arthur has been bewitched to fall in love with someone (Uther, just the once, but it lasted two episodes). Twice now, we have been served the same big revelation about Arthur’s birth. And countless times, Arthur is accidentally knocked out so as to allow Merlin to do some hocus-pocus unnoticed. At the same time, the scripts do provide lots of elements that could be taken further. There is Gaius’s past as a magician. There is the fact that sooner or later, Arthur must find out that Merlin is a wizard. Uther must realise that Morgana has magical powers. And what’s with the family connection of Morgana and Morgause (and/or Arthur, if applicable)? All these things are touched upon, but they never seem to go anywhere. It seems as if the writers try to draw everything out as much as possible – if, at least, you can trust them to have sown these seeds deliberately.

The writers have taken the Arthurian characters out of the framework of the legend, but they seem to have forgotten to build a framework of their own – or if they do have a framework, they are not making good use of it. I suppose people will say it’s a children’s show (actually it’s supposed to be ‘all audiences’) and that therefore it must not be too complex, but I find that more often than not, that argument is used as an excuse for laziness. I have read picture books for five-year-olds that have more subtlety and layers than a Merlin episode or, for that matter, a Harry Potter book. It is perfectly possible to create something that can be appreciated by children and yet does not make older readers/viewers feel as if they are too old or too smart to be reading/watching it.

So, why do I actually watch Merlin, and enjoy watching it, if my criticism is so harsh? Well: I guess that a very good reason for watching is the cast and the obvious pleasure they take in participating in the show. Colin Morgan’s Merlin is a sweet, clumsy and very winning young wizard whose chemistry with Bradley James (Arthur) is undeniable. Both Morgan and James are adorable comedians, but they don’t disappoint in dramatic moments either. And it’s great fun to watch these two interact. Angel Coulby makes a very loveable Guinevere, a devoted servant who nevertheless shows the kind of strength to convince you that she would make a great queen. The weakest link in the young cast, in my opinion, is Katie McGrath, who is gorgeous as Morgana but inclined to overact a little at times. The young actors are complemented by ‘old hands’ Anthony Head – formerly known as Rupert Giles, here a delightful King Uther – and Richard Wilson as Gaius, court physician and Merlin’s grandfatherly mentor. Moreover, Merlin has an excellent cast of villains, including Charles Dance, Mackenzie Crook, Adrian Lester and Emilia Fox.

Season Three is being filmed at this moment, and from what I have heard, it will have larger story arcs than Season Two. Let us hope that some of the other issues will be solved too. The actors – and the audience – deserve a little more effort.

And on the Gawain-o-meter...

Merlin simply doesn’t register – yet. Let’s check back after Season Three, which certainly shows promise :).

TDH pages 6 & 7

Today: a preview of my first two pages of the definitive TDH. No speech bubbles or texturing yet - these things are to be added digitally. Page 6 is inked with Staedtler pens and a Pentel brush pen on A3 Bristol board. I had only just finished it when I started noticing its flaws, but that's how it always goes :/.

Below: pencils for page 7. As you can see, it is decidely less crowded than page 6. I was exceedingly happy with it when it was just done, but in the meantime I think that it probably looks a bit haphazard. Argh.

Constructive criticism = welcome.

Digital painting

Oh look, it's an update! ;-)

I have been pottering around with Photoshop and came away from a tutorial with a really helpful tip: locking transparent pixels! That means that once you have set down a flat colour for a particular area, you lock the transparent pixels for that layer, and when you set down the shadows, you stay neatly within the right colour area. It makes painting in Photoshop that much easier. So I couldn't resist trying out my newly-honed skill on some old line art.

This girly cutie is Ambiorix from my (long-term) War in Gaul project.

And this big brute is Conan the Barbarian, drawn last year as a birthday gift for the only Conan fanboy of my acquaintance ;).

The contrast between those two almost hurts my eyes. Heh.

Experiments in Illustrator

My Illustrator classes will soon come to an end... Hopefully I will be able to continue next semester, because at this moment we have really only covered the basics - as you can tell by the attempts below :). The teacher showed me how to import and trace my line art to vectorise it. So far I haven't discovered how to manipulate the paths (*-_-*), but some things I have figured out. The vectorising function itself is great: it allows me to enlarge images without quality loss. The original Morgana picture is the size of a postcard. Now I have turned it into an A4 printable mini-poster. Squee!

SO MUCH still to learn, but I'm doing what I can...

The Arthurian Review, Issue 3

While on a trip to London in the late 1990s - I was in the middle of my First Arthurian Wave - I discovered Bernard Cornwell's Arthurian trilogy. I bought all three books in one go. The first two had just appeared in paperback; my copy of the third volume is a hardback I found in a second-hand store. Especially for the Arthurian Review, I went back to my mismatched set, to find out whether it is really the exciting series I thought it was back when I was about twenty :-)...


The Warlord Chronicles:
The Winter King (1995)
Enemy of God (1996)
Excalibur (1997)
Bernard Cornwell


A short while ago, asked by a friend whether I thought the HBO series Rome worthwhile, I made the following observation: there are essentially two approaches to historical fiction. The first assumes that people of the past were much like ourselves, with values and thought processes that do not differ all that much from our own. The second assumes that there is a wide gap between modern life and thought and that of the ancients. In his Arthurian trilogy, Bernard Cornwell clearly adheres to the latter approach. And let me assure you that he does it really well.

I don’t know how historically accurate or plausible Cornwell’s depiction of the late fifth, early sixth century in Britain is - because I have a natural tendency towards approach number one, whether or not that is justified - but he certainly succeeds in constructing a coherent and convincing Arthurian world. It is a savage place, ravaged by war and disease, by strife between rivalling warlords and competition between different religions. Ruled by superstition and oaths, it is a fairly alien world that has nothing whatsoever to do with the Arthurian society as we see it in medieval romances. There is lots of spitting to avert evil and scores of lice torment our heroes. There are Druids who perform atrocious rituals, sorcerers who style their hairdos with dung, hundreds of heads are lopped off, the skins of virgins are used as shield covers and magic invariably involves the use of blood, body parts, urine or faeces. Recipes are brought to you by Merlin and Nimue, mostly, and you are kindly advised not to try them at home. Now, one thing that distinguishes Cornwell’s treatment of magic from similar scenarios by other writers is that he leaves it up to the reader to determine whether or not all the crazy business with pee, poo and human sacrifices actually produces the least result. The line between the supernatural and the coincidental is never clearly drawn, a choice that allows Cornwell to have sorcerers without drifting off into the realm of fantasy and the all-too-improbable. The result is that magic in the Warlord Chronicles is actually plausible - even if I do remain sceptical about the spells :-).

Actually, the Warlord Chronicles contain quite a few story elements that have the potential of giving me allergic reactions. It has barbarous rituals and a society that seems barely civilised. It has a violent conflict between Pagans and Christians. It proposes a ‘realistic’ look at a society about which we know too little to make accurate assumptions. It uses medieval French and English names of Arthurian characters like Galahad and Agloval and mixes them with old Welsh names like Hygwydd and Emrys and Mynydd Baddon. But reading this trilogy did not give me a rash. The books are skilfully written and well-plotted; the story simply took me along and it worked. I enjoyed it when I first read it more than ten years ago, and despite having become much more critical since, I had a great time rereading it.

In Cornwell’s version, Arthur is not a king and Mordred is not his son. Instead, Mordred is King Uther’s grandson and the legitimate king of Dumnonia, whereas Arthur, Uther’s illegitimate son, is a warlord sworn to protect and support Mordred until he comes of age. Unfortunately Mordred turns out to be less than suitable to rule, and almost everybody urges Arthur to usurp the crown. Arthur, ironically, does not want the crown at all. He has very definite ideas about how the land should be ruled, and as a powerful and successful warlord he could easily seize Dumnonia, but all he really wants is a simple life. Throughout the trilogy he is torn between the oaths he has sworn, the dictates of reason, and his personal longings. He is a man who always acts for the best, but his decisions invariably bring him on a collision course with someone or other - whether it be his clever and ambitious wife Guinevere, his enigmatic former teacher Merlin, the cowardly and vain prince Lancelot, the conniving bishop Sansum or his own best friends Culhwch and Derfel.

Derfel Cadarn is the story’s narrator. Saxon and slave-born, he survives a Druid’s death pit and is subsequently adopted by Merlin, Druid and Lord of Ynys Wydryn. Derfel grows up to be a hardy spearman and warlord staunchly loyal to Arthur. Due to circumstances that I cannot reveal without spoiling a few good plot twists, he eventually becomes a monk, in which capacity he commits Arthur’s story to parchment at the behest of Queen Igraine of Powys. (A Wikipedia search has taught me that there is actually a Catholic saint Derfel Gadarn who was a companion of Arthur’s before he became a monk - I adore that kind of thing.)

The idea of an old man writing down the story of a hero he knew in his youth may not be amazingly original, but in this case it is one of the things that add charm to the series. When Derfel tells of the events he has witnessed, he doesn’t leave out the gory details and refuses to glorify people and events. His benefactress, Queen Igraine, belongs to a younger generation that has already begun to fantasise about Arthur, his reign and the people surrounding him, and she frequently takes Derfel to task for not embellishing his tale or for not telling it the way she has heard it from the poets. As a reader, you get an amusing contrast between a reality that could have been and the legend that we all know.

In my opinion, the story gets better as it moves along; the first book is the one I enjoyed least. As you read on, you see the plot elements come together and situations and characters become more nuanced. Cornwell has a sense of humour that serves to lighten up some of the gloom of his story of a decaying society and he creates several memorable characters - his version of Arthur, Guinevere and Merlin are among my favourite interpretations of the legendary figures.

And the Gawain-o-meter says...

Which Gawain?

Name:
Prince Gawain of Broceliande

Family:
His father is King Budic of Broceliande; his mother is Anna, sister of Arthur. There is an Agravain in the novels, but he is not mentioned as being related to Gawain. Gawain is Arthur’s nephew, but we never see the two of them interact.

Presence:
He only appears in the last volume. Though he is of crucial importance to Merlin and Nimue, he is only a minor character and doesn’t get a lot of page time.

Character:
Very gentle and very innocent. Merlin considers him ‘tedious’ and ‘stupid’ because he wants to improve the world. In a nice twist, Cornwell’s Gawain has promised Merlin to preserve his virginity :P.

Looks:
Very beautiful with a slim figure and long golden hair. Looks and sounds kind and has a lovely voice. He is only fifteen or sixteen and has no trace of a beard yet. Though rather ludicrously attired in cheap armour, his beauty and bearing ensure that he does not look ridiculous.

If this description should give you the impression that Cornwell favours Gawain, I can disclose that this is a delusion. Poor Gawain has rarely been treated worse! He is nice and very good-looking, but goodness, the fate the author has reserved for him is terrible. Wah.


For future issues of the Review (in random order):

Gillian Bradshaw’s Down the Long Wind trilogy
Der rote Ritter by Adolf Muschg
Chauvel & Lereculey’s Arthur series
Camelot 3000 by Mike W. Barr and Brian Bolland
Merlin, the BBC series
Merlin, the 1998 mini-series
Kaamelott Livre VI, the M6 series
The Winter Prince by Elizabeth E. Wein
Uther & Igraine by Warwick Deeping

An Emblem

Do you remember my Virgin Mary? I traced and coloured her in Illustrator. Last Monday I had a go at designing an emblem for my Gawain site, taking into account a few things I had learnt from the Mary Experiment. This time I didn't trace, but made my own design, once more based on the Book of Kells. It was fun, though I suspect there must be better ways of doing the knotwork than the process I used ;).

Well, I hope you like it. Personally, I find the wide-eyed, never-smiling Celtic look rather endearing *g*.

Ale & Wenches

Especially for Wim: the same page lettered with Ale & Wenches. Please do let me know how it reads. I like this font a lot, but personally I feel that Red State, Blue State is easier to read. Would definitely use Ale & Wenches for captions, though - the medieval feel is just great.

PS: try the full view to see the page at the size it will be posted in :).

More test thingies

I am, as you know, very busy experimenting with all sorts of techniques for the final version of the comic. Below are two pages from the storyboard that I used for testing Photoshop stuff on. The first page has been coloured digitally; the second one has been lettered digitally with a free font from Blambot.

Please let me know what you think!

I coloured this in a very simple way, and relatively quickly. The result is not too bad, I think. But next, I tried to colour the page below and soon discovered that everything gets really complicated and time-consuming once there are several frames on one page :/. Part of the troubles originated from my use of vector paths as panel frames. I won't need to *draw* frames in Photoshop in the final version, so that's a bit of mess I wouldn't have to worry about, but still: my skills are not quite up to scratch.

I rather like this font. It's not difficult to letter in Photoshop, and to be honest, I kind of enjoy getting neat letters in neat lines. I never draw lines when I hand-letter, just because it's too much of a bore. But the result tends to be a little bit ... well ... amateurish :). But ... do you like the digital version?

A Test with Morgana

File under: Experiment.

I am trying to figure out how best to go about drawing the comic. The questions are many: colour or monochrome? Pencil or ink? A4 or A3? It is important to get everything right, so that I don’t run into trouble at some point in the future.

I had more or less decided on inks and monochrome, because black and white is what I think I do best. Colour still gives me trouble. I adore watercolour, but I am not good enough at it to paint a comic. I have seen digital colours that I like, but I don’t have the Photoshop skills to achieve them myself. Nevertheless, in a comic in which the colour of the hero’s hair and, occasionally, the colour of his enemies plays a part in the story, it would be kind of nice to have colours.

Now – one way of colouring that I do feel up to is with colour pencils. I like what I can do with pencils on the pages of my Moleskine notebook, so I sought loose sheets on which I could more or less reproduce that effect. The paper that I think comes closest to Moleskine is Bristol board. So I had a try with that. The result is this:

The original is very crisp and, I think, rather pretty (if I may say so myself). I think it reproduced fairly well… The skin tones are very delicate, and some of their subtlety got lost, as did the blue of her eyes – but all in all I think the scan is not so bad.

In order to judge the effect in a comic page, I will have to actually draw and colour a complete page, I guess. Still, I’d much appreciate your opinion about this little test. What do you think?

I also made a version with texture added in Photoshop. This is not difficult and could easily be done in the comic too, I suspect.

One disadvantage that colour will always have is that it is more expensive to print than black and white. That is in case anyone besides myself would like to hold a paper version of the story .

Anyway: I would love to hear your opinion on this – on the feasability of a comic drawn entirely in pencils, a comic coloured with colour pencils etc. Please let me know what you think!

Say Hi to Gawain

Because once in a while, he actually comes out looking more or less the way he should look. Now for a nice colour scheme...

No, seriously: why on earth is it so difficult to draw my main character properly?! *sigh*



This was drawn with mechanical pencils in a Moleskine sketchbook. (I am liking the combination of Moleskine and pencils more and more.) It took several hours. (Don't ask.) No reference used. (Bad habits die hard.) Finally, the sketch was slightly pimped in Photoshop. (No cleaning; just added texture and some highlights.)

So there.

Site and Stuff

This journal has been a bit quiet lately. I haven't got very much to post as I have been busy with my brand-new website lately. The site, www.gawaincomic.com, will be the home of, well, the Gawain comic. Quite a few people told me that they were interested in the comic, but did not follow it because they don't find the format sufficiently reader-friendly. They are right, of course: this blog is meant for blogging and not particularly suited for posting comics, especially novel-length ones. There were only two options to remedy the problem: either the comic had to be printed, or it had to move to a comic-friendly website. I looked into printing possibilities, but if you want a decent-looking book, it will cost money, and I don't have a very wide readership, which makes a print run a little ludicrous. So I finally became convinced that the best thing to do would be to give the comic its own site, where you can easily read the story chronologically, consult the archive etcetera. Hopefully I will be able to draw a few more readers with a real webcomic, and eventually a small print run may be a possibility.

I don't know a lot about website building or coding, but I have managed to set up a WordPress-based comics site with a lot of help from my friend Rembrand, whose own webcomic you ought to check out ;-). The site needs quite a bit of work: the Inkblot theme for comics is one that you need to (well, site-savvy people would say 'can' and be happy about the fact *g*) customise by adapting the CSS stylesheet. That means I need to get into coding and that I have some massive figuring-out to do. I have a few ideas about how I would like it to look and am at the moment tinkering with design stuff. As I am not very design- or Adobe-fluent yet, that is very much a discovery and trial-and-error process. Fortunately my Illustrator classes do help a little.

Here is a first little thingy that I put together in Illustrator and Photoshop:

I am ridiculously proud of it because it combines 1) using the Pen tool in Illustrator, which I have only just learnt to do, 2) using texture in Photoshop, which I'd never done before (yes, I know), and 3) colouring in Illustrator, which I figured out all by my lonesome and consequently am likely to have done in a very inefficient way, but hey, it looks the way I wanted it to look, even if it did take me hours and hours ;P.

What I eventually want with this madonna is to make a kind of shield emblem. As per Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, there is an image of the madonna on the inside of Gawain's shield. Because I wanted an emblematic and Celtic-looking Virgin, I used my newly-acquired Illustrator Skillz to trace an image from the Book of Kells.

I am also trying to establish what the definitive shape of the comic pages should be - A3, A4, pencils + Photoshopping, pencils + ink, with or without colour patches, Photoshop or other. It's SO not easy and SO very important.

*ponders*

And with that, I'll disappear again.

Ygraine

I don't want to count the hours I spent working on this small picture! It measures 13 x 21 cm and I started it on the Thalys to Paris. (I have a little something with trains and drawing, don't I?) All that remains from what I drew on the train is the nose, the hand and the rose. All else was reworked again and again. All that to end up with such a flawed drawing... But somehow I like its flaws. They give Ygraine something a little bit otherworldly, which is quite appropriate to the character.

I didn't expect I would be happy with the colours I got from using colour pencils. But it turns out that I am. Maybe my colours skills have improved, because when I tried colour pencils in a Moleskine sketchbook before, I didn't like the result at all. Now I am actually looking for a type of paper as close in texture to Moleskine as I can find, because I want to do this again in the future on loose sheets :-).

I spent more time and effort than usual researching the costume and jewellery (even though you don't see a whole lot of it *g*). That is because this drawing is part of my concept pictures for the final version of The Darkest Hour. More will follow.

King Emrys - for Sien

Bren Emrys, or King Ambrosius, is one of those half-mythical kings who are said to have ruled Britain after Rome left the island to its own devices. Legend (and John Morris) has it that Ambrosius Aurelianus succeeded King Vortigern, who notoriously invited the Saxons Hengist and Horsa to Britain. Ambrosius' reputation is as good as Vortigern's is bad - because it was Ambrosius who is said to have been successful at pushing the Saxons back.

One of Ambrosius' clever moves was to befriend a sorcerer born from the union of a demon and a nun: a young man called Merlin, or Myrddin in Welsh. It was at the request of Ambrosius that Merlin used his stupendous magical power to transfer from Ireland to Britain a monument known as the Giants' Ring. Nowadays we call it Stonehenge. Merlin's association with Ambrosius earned him a second name, and he became known as Merlin Ambrosius, or Myrddin Emrys.

When King Emrys, scourge of the Saxons, lay ill, a Saxon spy disguised himself as a priest and, pretending to offer the King medicine, poisoned him. Emrys was buried in Stonehenge and succeeded by his younger brother Uther, called Pendragon, who would soon father Arthur.

So that is the story of Emrys in a nutshell :-).

King Emrys doesn't actually appear in my comic. He is only referred to on page 9, ushering in his brother Uther, one of the main characters of The Darkest Hour. This portrait of the king was drawn at the request of my friend Sien, who earned herself a gift picture by being the 3000th viewer of this blog. Sien's adorable baby boy is called Emrys, hence the subject :-).

It is my first painting in Photoshop, so I beg your indulgence. The linework was done in pencil. By my standards, this portrait is unusually realistic. I don't go looking for realism, normally, but I found that painting with Photoshop somehow invites it - at least for a beginner like me. I lost count of the hours I spent working on this, but it certainly was great fun.

My first digital painting...

Used my tiny new Wacom tablet to do a 'pastel'. It looks more like paint to me, but it was fun :-).

Gawain Project: I. The Darkest Hour - Master List

Hit befel in the dayes of Vther Pendragon, when he was Kynge of all Englond and so regned, that there was a myghty duke in Cornewaill that helde warre ageynest hym long tyme, and the duke was called the Duke of Tyntagil. And so by meanes Kynge Vther send for this duk, chargyng hym to brynge his wyf with hym, for she was called a fair lady and a passyng wyse, and her name was called Igrayne.

- Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur (1485)

I. The Darkest Hour

On a dark winter's night, the Queen of Britain tells a sorcerer of the wrongs she has suffered at the hands of a man. The woes of Ygraine will determine the lives of her descendants.

1-3 - 4-6 - 7-9 - 10-12 - 13-15 - 16-18 - 19-21 - 22-24 - 25-27 - 28-31 - 32-35 - 36-40 - 41-44 - 45-47 - 48-50 - 51-53 - 54-57 - 58-60 - 61-64 - 65-66 - 67-69 - 70-73 - 74-75 - 76-81 - 82-84 - 85-87 - 88-90 - 91-92 - 93-97 - 98-101 - 102-103 - 104-108 - 109-111 - 112-114 - 115-119


Next:

II. Sunrise

The Darkest Hour 115-119 (Epilogue)

Oh frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! We have made it to the end of the first story arc! I hope you have enjoyed the ride - and of course I also hope you will tune in for the next episode :) . It's actually going to feature the hero of my tale.

I'll post a master list with links to all pages soon. Then I have to start thinking about the future of this comic. It will go on, to be sure, because I have a lot of tales to tell and take an immense pleasure in telling them. The question is rather what form the comic will/should take.

But first I'll have a bit of a break. I have been writing, drawing, posting almost non-stop since April 2009. This story was easy-peasy compared to what comes next, so I need to reload a bit.

Meanwhile, BY ALL MEANS let me know your opinions, sentiments, constructive criticism etcetera regarding the Darkest Hour storyboard. I will start on the definitive version of the comic soon, so now is the time to offer your advice for improvements!

For now: have an Epilogue.

(As always, click the images for a larger version.)

Thank you very much for reading along!