Last month's night of intuitive drawing reminds me that perhaps the best thing I have done for my writing was to go to a set of creative workshops that were full of little missions. The workshops were devised and run by Jean Dark AKA Bella Basura. Reading even a little bit of the Jean Dark or the Bella Basura websites you get the idea of how experimental and innovative she is. For example there is a play set in a future where Shakespeare spliced with 80s junk advert tag lines and with 'vehicle reversing' and with 'unexpected item in the bagging area' is AIs best guess at high literature, a story of a filthy old flat being inspected by a council worker who's mind turns to his bike pump and story written from the point of view of a podiatrist on a first date with a movie star who is perfect in every way except for her blessed feet.
In the creative workshops we did things like taking a card from a deck of tarot and a picture from a stack Jean had printed and combined the two in a tale, we took a twisty path to Cherry Hinton Hall Park and wrote about the journey and at the end of the course we put together a night of readings at the Edge cafe and sold hand made anthologies of the work.
I found some of my writing from the time of the course. This is a true story that I titled Silver woman:
When I think about it, the main places I've seen her are around the homeless shelter. She is as curved as a letter 'C' and all silver: thin silver hair framing her round face, silvery coat with no skirt underneath, just her sturdy bare legs with slip-on shoes, even her skin seems silvery or shimmery somehow. Sometimes she has a plastic bag bulging with bread from the bakery. Do they give her that at the end of the day? The stuff they would otherwise throw away? Sometimes she is completely drenched in rain sitting in the park, glimmering in the grey. In all the times I've seen her she's never been asking for money. That's not to say she doesn't. I did see her several times when I was living in a flat on a traffic island. There were a couple of crossings to get to my flat, over busy traffic and she often stood at the crossing and asked me if I'd help her cross. It was on my way so I obliged. I wondered if this was some sort of scam as she looped her arm through mine and we went, ever so slowly, together over the zebra crossing and then the next crossing in silence and then she went on her way. It happened several times after that. Just looping arms, walking silently, then on her way. I saw her from my kitchen window doing the same routine with other people. As the kettle boiled I wondered: does she just want to be close to someone, is it simply that?
The workshops really fuelled my own writing missions and challenges. Some of my writing has sprung from a fascination with little bits of science, with the powder-fine grains of words that come from beyond our senses. I got one of my favourite stories from collecting 'and finally' stories read at the end of the news. I give myself the challenge to put something that is an interface between the atmosphere and the land or sea in my stories. For example the frost flowers in the tale of the Arctic fox and the oxygen in layers of sea sediment in the West Runton Mammoth. It is just a simple thing, but it comes about because if I'm going to make a world for things to happen in, it will be a world that has an atmosphere.
The point of these creative games, I remember Jean saying, is to trick your brain. Writing so often feels weighty, maybe because it is a very special thing to do, but the trick is to feel as if none of those weighty things exist, to be more natural, more carefree and playful and open up the possibility of who knows what might happen next.
This month I took part in an evening of Drawing as Embodied Self-Trust that was created and run by Haley Craw. It was in a lull between heatwaves and the high ceilings and airy space of The Bank in Eye with a soft breeze through the open windows provided a calming haven. Along with nine other participants we were seated at spacious desk all arranged in an oval that faced inward towards Haley in the centre. Each desk was equipped with a pile of A3 paper and charcoal. The aim was simply to draw with our eyes closed and with music playing. To begin I touched the paper's rough edges, becoming attuned to the feeling of the delicate willow charcoal on the paper's surface. Later we were given crumbly coloured chalks that filled the tiny indentations of the textured sheet. The feeling of marking a surface became fascinating, finding different levels of touch, finding movement to be rhythmic or slow or stop when stopping feels right, beginning when that feels necessary. Over the space of two hours we opened our eyes and got to see how what feels right might look.
Like most kids I grew up drawing with pencils, wax crayons, felt tip pens or grainy paint on poster paper, and part of the joy is the experience of marking the paper with this stationary, learning a little bit of muscle control, choosing colours, the associated smells and sounds and sensations. That pleasing feeling of finding a balance between controlling the materials and the freedom of showing on the paper anything you choose. There is a little reward system there, that is linked in to a bigger reward system of people responding to the result and you responding to your own work. But before other people are involved and before you learn to respond to yourself, there is that time where it is just you and the sensation of the materials: a little relationship from earliest memory, before you could articulate it, and it sticks with you in some way or other. That is what this session with Haley felt like: that earliest connection.
I always tried to let my comics be what they wanted to be without too much fuss on my end. I kind of let them go whatever direction they wanted to go, and followed. So as far as development, it was really just continually making comics over time, and letting them develop naturally the way they wanted to develop.
When John speaks about continually making comics over time, it makes sense, if you keeping on making pictures and stories, although you can't request it and although it doesn't come to order, it is likely that patterns will emerge and that the work will take on new and interesting qualities. To make work regularly I want to feel comfortable doing it. So I can do it more. The conditions of the drawing that night at the Bank brought that comfort which is a bit of a breakthrough in my world.
I took a short holiday recently and walked the coastal path from Sherringham to Cromer and along the way there is the Sea View beach cafe in West Runton. It is a cafe that serves tea and coffee and ice cream but it also has a fossil museum. Most of the fossils have been found on the coastline of West Runton. So it was a contrast, walking the coastal path in the present day with people pushing dogs in those little buggies and seeing the sea stretch out for miles and climbing the Beeston Bump that is said to have been the base of Black Shuck: the mythical dog depicted in this print from 1577 by Abraham Fleming entitled a strange and terrible wunder and a horrible-shaped thing, and at the cafe in display cases there are deer jaw bones that are double the size we would expect from a deer now, and a cast of the tibia from a Mammuthus trogontherii or steppe mammoth standing 83cm high and fascinating tube-shaped shells, basically the remains of a different land that stood in the same spot.
There is a scientific paper describing the excavations of the West Runton Mammoth that resulted in the tibia cast displayed in the cafe. The paper has photos taken in 1995 that show the sheer size of the bones that were found preserved. Lifting a Mammoth femur or a partial Mammoth skull and tusk of such a weight out of the ground involved coating them with plaster to keep them intact and noting exactly where they were retrieved in the sediment with a theodolite for angle measurement and to a granularity of within ten centimetres. The recording of the bone's positions in the ground was important as there had been previous excavations to coordinate with. In 1990 coastal erosion exposed an enormous pelvic bone at the West Runton cliff site, the paper describes a rapidly-improvised excavation where the pelvis proved both very heavy and much more fragile than it had first appeared, with the unfortunate result that it was recovered in many fragments. However a left astragalus or ankle bone was removed in it's entirety and the pelvis could be pieced together. Between 1991 and 1992 the paper describes the excavations of the mammoth bones surrounding the pelvis stating that about twenty five percent of the Mammoth skeleton was recovered including the mandible and several limb bones, vertebrae and ribs. The positions of these finds in the ground were mapped using a simple line and offset technique. There is a diagram of the near complete Mammoth skeleton from a paper about the evolutionary stage of the West Runton mammoth that shows what was unearthed through the combined efforts of all the excavations up to 1995, from a giant sheet-like shoulder blade down to tiny bones in the tail and the toes. The position of the larger mammoth bones in the ground is shown in outline in this picture of the excavation site, along with the places of excavation of pollen, plant macrofossils, beetles and small vertebrates. The bones are shown in great detail, named and colour coded for tusks and skull and limb bones and the left and right side of the body in figure two of this paper on the taphonomy of the Mammoth bones, taphonomy being the study of how things become fossilized.
The question arises of what sort of setting did this Mammoth live in? Figure one of this paper on the the sediment analysis of the West Runton mammoth excavation site shows that there are signs of a subsidence extending either side of the fossil's ground positions and running parallel with the modern cliff face. Within the subsidence depression there is evidence of a freshwater bed over a chalk base. The same paper on the sediment in the freshwater bed describes through a combination of the chemistry of the silts that turned to sedimentary rock and the accumulation of pollen within them a picture of a fast flowing water with frequent flood events surrounded by grasses and sedges constituting a herb-rich grassland and that later the shelly sandy waters slowed to be stiller and surrounded by birch, pine, elm and alder trees which later gave way to a mixed oak forest. This type of plant life implies that the Freshwater Bed experienced weather between likely glacial cold climates.
The sort of time frames we are looking at placing a setting as aged as the West Runton freshwater bed are those defined by Marine Isotope Stages. The Marine Isotope Stages are a measure of the different forms of oxygen present in the calcium carbonate shells of marine creatures and pollen and plankton in different layers of marine sediment. As described in this video Oxygen can exist in several atomic forms. Here we are concerned with the proportion of Oxygen-16 which has a nucleus composed of eight protons and eight neutrons, compared to the atomically heavier Oxygen-18 which has a nucleus structure of eight protons and ten neutrons. Proportionately high levels of oxygen-18 relative to Oxygen-16 represent cold glacial periods. Working backwards from the present, which is Marine Isotope Stage one in the scale. The stages with even numbers have high levels of oxygen-18 and represent cold glacial periods, while the odd-numbered stages are lower in oxygen-18 and represent largely warmer interglacial intervals. The stages can be divided into sub-stages as shown for example in this study.
Placing the West Runton Freshwater Bed in geological time and relative to other geological settings is a delicate activity. The West Runton mammoth site allowed access many specialists of smaller fossils who extracted specimens from the sediment from defined positions to examine for their evolutionary stages and chemical markers of age. The first table in this paper gives a sense of the range of the species excavated. Some specific studies include those of birds, amphibians and reptiles, molluscs, hyaena, beetles, freshwater shell proteins, fish, deer and horses, voles and mice and volcanic minerals. Here are just two of these studies as examples to get a sense of how such extreme age is processed.
Small mammals such as voles, shrews, mice, moles etc are classed as micromammals. There is a paper that describes how within the main scatter of West Runton mammoth bones samples of micromammals were taken at five centimetre intervals through the complete 1.35 m column of the organic detritus muds. The paper explains how a total of more than 8,000 small mammal remains were recovered of which approximately 1,000 elements (mostly isolated teeth) were identified to species level. For example there are incredible pictures of the jaw and teeth of the shrew Macroneomys brachygnathus from the West Runton site. In total the remains of 16 species of micromammal are described.
One of the species in the paper is a small mammal called Mimomys savini which is a now extinct genus of vole. This species of vole evolved to be larger in size and have noticeably different teeth leading to a gradual loss of ‘mimomyian’ traits as it evolved to the species Arvicola. Scientists have documented these jaw and tooth changes in fine detail, for example figure one of this paper on the dental evolution of voles illustrates the increasingly intricate structure of the first lower molar of the Arvicolinae. The transition from Mimomys to Arvicolinae happened over a relatively short geological time frame and on account of the vole's rapid migration they are found over a wide geography, making them a strong indicator of archaeological site age. As well as West Runton there are other sites in the United Kingdom include Westbury-sub-Mendip, Boxgrove, Waverley Wood in the Midlands and Sidestrand all contain fossils of voles of Mimomys to Arvicola lineage.
With the vole jaw fossils providing a relative comparison for the age of sites, scientists tested other methods to define the age of these settings. For example this paper describes a comparison of protein in two species of freshwater mollusc shells in the West Runton, the Hoxnian site at Clacton-on-Sea, Essex and the Waverley Wood in the Midlands sites. Proteins, the building blocks of living things, are long chains of amino acid residues. The age of fossils and by extension the setting they were extracted from, can be estimated by how the amino acids change over time. The paper describes how Amino acids generally occur in two forms, called stereoisomers or enantiomers, which are mirror images of each other. These stereoisomers were originally named by the direction in which they rotate plane-polarised light: laevo-rotatory (l) and dextro-rotatory (d).. Here is an example of one of the amino acids, Serine, studied in the freshwater shells in both it's l and d form Serine L-Serine (left) and D-serine (right). When an organism such as a freshwater mollusc is alive the amino acid residues in proteins are of the l-form. When the organism dies or when there is no more tissue-turnover the paper describes how the l-form is thermodynamically unstable and then spontaneously the l-form slowly turns into a mirror image d-forms until an equilibrium of d- and l-amino acids is reached. This process is called racemization and it occurs at particular rates over long time frames. Racemization is influenced by temperature and ph and so it is an estimate of extreme age.
The paper measured the racemization of five different amino acids from different locations on the shells of two species of mollusc: Valvata piscinalis and Bithynia tentaculata which were present in all three sites. The results for each of the three sites are presented in a table that compares the extent of racemization of five amino acids. This table along with figure one leads to the authors of the paper to state that the extent of protein decomposition in the West Runton opercula is significantly higher than those from both Clacton and Waverley Wood. This is fitting with the paper that describes how the fossils of the water vole Mimomys savini was found in the West Runton site while it's evolutionary descendant Arvicola was present at Waverley Wood. The authors continue that at the 95% confidence level, 5 and 7 out of the 12 protein decomposition indicators from the Valvata and Bithynia shells respectively show that the WRFB is significantly older than Clacton, whilst all 12 of the protein decomposition indicators from the Bithynia opercula support this. This paper concludes that it was too early, on the basis of the amino acid data alone, to attribute the West Runton Freshwater Bed to a particular stage in the marine oxygen isotope record, although a pre-MIS 13 age is indicated, which represents a time frame that started 524 thousand years ago.
There we have it, a little something of how scientific papers describe a setting like the West Runton Freshwater Bed and a phenomena like a buried mammoth that would have been twice the size of a elephant today, with the details of lifting bones of such an enormous size out of the ground, coating and protecting them and noting exactly where they were placed, the tiny jaws and teeth and evolution of a water vole, the pollen and spores that would have floated in the air and the plants that created them and the weather that the plants would imply, the chemistry of long term ageing in oxygen isotope ratios in marine shells that provide a climate framework and the minute changes in amino acids that occur once living creatures are preserved in sediment. I like the intricate connection of one detail of this setting relating to another to give a picture of time and place and that it all came from a holiday walk along a cliff to a cafe. I also like how similar the scientific method is to writing fiction which is about everything doing its work of explaining something else.
I have been exploring how to draw buildings in perspective for a comic I would like to make called The Adventures of Stilton. The buildings can be drawn as cubes, rotated to different angles. A cube is a shape where identical square faces join to neighbouring faces with an internal angle of 90 degrees. However the issue is that the cube will appear to have differently proportioned faces and a range of angles between those faces when it is seen in perspective and those angles and proportions will appear to change yet again as the cube is rotated. So it is clear that some strategies are needed to build up information to represent a cube in perspective and rotated in perspective.
In this post I thought I would describe one of the methods I have been using to rotate a cube in perspective. The method begins with what I call a framing square which is just a square drawn in one point perspective. The framing square is double the width of the cube I want. Within the framing square I can construct identical cubes in eight different positions. This video shows the eight different cube positions in the framing square. One in each of the four corners of the framing square by dividing the square horizontally and vertically in perspective, and one in each of the four divisions when the framing square is divided diagonally. All eight cubes have an edge fixed at the centre of the framing square, I call it the axis edge.
As a brief outline to how the cubes are built up they can be considered to be made of following pieces: the axis edge, that is the same for all the cubes, then the face of the axis edge, for the four cubes that fit exactly within the framing square the cubes are constructed from the corresponding edges of the framing square and for the cubes on the diagonal divisions of the framing square, the face with the axis edge traces a circle that fits perfectly within the framing square and then the remaining faces of these four cubes can be constructed from a two point perspective that comes from drawing of the framing square. That outline will be so much clearer as I go through the more detailed steps of constructing these cubes.
To begin I draw the framing square in perspective. I start with a blank sheet of paper and I draw a cross made of a horizontal and vertical line as I described in my post for March this year. There seems to be a convention of calling the horizontal line the horizon line and the vertical line the line of sight and the point they intersect the view point, so those are the terms I'll use. Then I choose a point to fan out two lines at 45 degrees from the line of sight so that the 45 degree lines go on to cross the horizon line. The intersection points of the 45 degree lines and the horizon line I shall call the 45 degree points, they become useful for the next part.
The front of the square can be drawn anywhere parallel to the horizon line but for this drawing I place the horizontal line equally divided by the line of sight. I also like to make the horizontal line a length that I can easily divide into ten equal parts, this will be useful later when I draw a circle within the square. Then I send two lines from either side of the front of the square to the view point, these are the sides of the square. The sides of the square are now useful to determine the depth or where the back of the cube will be. Drawing a line from the front corner of the square to the opposite 45 degree point on the horizon line will cross the newly drawn side of the square. The place this line crosses the square side is the back of the square, so I could just draw a line from this point that will be parallel with the horizon line and have completed the square. However I like to repeat the process on the opposite front corner of the framing square so that I have two points, one on either side of the square's sides that I can join to form the back of the square. The benefit of this extra step is that I get two diagonal lines from the front corners of the square to the opposite back corners and the point these lines cross is the centre of the framing square in perspective, which is a very useful thing.
At this point I could draw the four cubes in the corners of the framing square, beginning with the axis edge that all the cubes share. However I prefer to leave the construction of the axis edge until after I have drawn the circle within the framing square as drawing the circle, which in perspective appears as an ellipse, finds all the reference lines I need for the axis edge along with it.
I draw a circle in the framing square by dividing the square up into a grid. To do this I follow a method described in this Dan Beardshaw video about drawing a circle in perspective. A grid can be formed in the square by drawing lines from ten equally spaced points on the front edge of the square. The vertical lines of the grid simply extend from the ten equal unit points to the view point. The horizontal lines are drawn with a method similar to the way the back of the framing square was identified: from each of the ten unit points on the front of the square I draw a line to one of the 45 degree points. It can be either of the 45 degree points but all ten lines need to go to the same point. Then the intersection from each of these lines and side of the framing square nearest to the 45 degree point chosen marks the position of the horizontal lines of the grid. There is a nice check here that the fifth of these lines pass through the centre of the framing square defined also by the diagonal lines crossing from the front to the back of the framing square.
With this ten-by-ten square grid in perspective I have not only the middle of the square marked out horizontally and vertically by the fifth of the ten horizontal lines, which are all points where the ellipse will touch, but I also have some guide points for the ellipse between these points. The ellipse will pass diagonally through the grid squares that are one column in and one row up from each corner of the square. I like to lightly shade these squares as they are useful points of reference that I will call the shaded squares. With all this information and some care I draw an ellipse.
Along with the horizon line, the view point and the 45 degree points, I now have the following all in perspective: the framing square, the circle within and two ways to identify the centre of the framing square, through the crossing of the diagonal lines and the crossing of the fifth of the ten grid lines. This is all I need to construct all eight cubes.
To construct the four cubes that fit exactly within in the framing square when it is divided into four equal squares and will be drawn in the same one point perspective as the framing square, I need the framing square and the fifth of the ten lines from the grid that divides the framing square into four equal spaces in perspective and the view point. I shall now refer to the squares formed by dividing the framing square by the fifth grid lines as the cube bases. These cube bases have the quality that their width is equal to the cube's height from this perspective. So I draw two vertical lines from each of the cube base's corners that are the same height as the cube base's width. The new sides of the cube then are connected with a horizontal line that forms the cube's top front edge. Extending lines from both of the top front corners of the cube to the view point gives the top sides of the cube. I use a transparent ruler to get the vertical lines to be perpendicular to the horizontal lines of the framing square. In constructing these four cubes I have also drawn the axis edge that is needed for drawing the next four cubes.
To draw the cubes aligned with the diagonal divisions of the framing square, that is within the lines that defined the depth of the framing square and extend from the front corners of the framing square to the 45 degree points on the horizon line, I need the framing square, the circle that appears as an ellipse within the framing square, the 45 degree points on the horizon line and the axis edge.
The cube face with the axis edge already has two sides in place, the axis edge itself and the diagonal line up to the point of ellipse, to complete this cube face I draw a line from the top of the axis edge to the 45 degree point that is closest to the ellipse edge we are drawing to, this forms the top edge of the cube face. The face is completed with a vertical line up to the top edge from the ellipse. The 45 degree points on the horizon line now function as the vanishing points to draw the remaining cube faces in two point perspective.
Now I have a drawing of eight identical cubes each at different angles and in perspective. Drawing comics is where you imagine something and write and draw it into being, so you meet your imagination with a reality of your own creation. It is a full circle. Learning some perspective with a bit of care gets me just a little bit closer to that full circle.
My most favourite short story I have written is nature adventure fuelled by the internet. I wanted to write about how using the internet can, in certain ways, be a good place to be creative and as I did so themes of 'the way things move around the globe' and 'things preserved in time' started to emerge and so I let that happen. Part of my motivation for the story was that I really like to make my own website where I can set the tone and be myself. So it seems right to explain how I made and continue to make my website, after all, writing it feels as important to being a cartoonist as learning perspective or crafting stories to tell.
I think that maybe I can best describe my website by showing how it is organised. One way I organise the website is to keep the words I want to appear on screen as separate as possible from the extra details the browsers needs to display those words. For example the browser needs to know what is a heading, what is a paragraph, what is navigation. That information comes by surrounding the writing you want see on screen with tags that the browser can interpret as being the paragraph part or the heading or navigation part of the text.
The tags come from long standing recommendations from the W3C that have, over the years, been reliably taken into account by browser developers. However, although the tags are defined to some degree it is up to personal choice how they are applied to any particular piece of writing.
Designing the site to be mostly monthly update posts means that each post has the same format so that means the tags can be fitted in a reliable pattern. The article element represents a complete, or self-contained, composition in a document. A monthly update seems to fit that description very nicely. A heading can be included within the article tag which adds to the description of the article and so can the paragraphs of monthly update text which may be grouped into sections if the post covers several topics each with it's own section. I decided to leave the navigation out of the article as the two forms of navigation that I have are the breadcrumb trail back to the home page, and the other navigation is articles that are chronologically related and so are not necessarily links that have the same topic as the article.
Another part of the website to organise is the site file structure. I wanted to keep the homepage, that is the page that loads when someone visits the domain, quite spare, giving myself the freedom to add new sections to the website in the future. I wanted the monthly pages to be collated by years so that you can read all the monthly entries for that year on one page. The title of the monthly update on the year page would link you through to the individual month's page. I decided that it would be just the latest year page that would be linked from the homepage. So the file structure begins with the homepage and any related pages like the about page and then a directory for each of the years I have written monthly updates for and within the year directories there is a directory for each of the monthly pages numbered from one (for January) to twelve (for December).
By designing the website around monthly updates with a reliable pattern and navigation links that also follow a pattern because of the site's file structure it became possible to begin to separate the words on the screen from the extra details the browsers needs to display those words. I wrote some code that takes the writing of the monthly updates that are in text files suitably labelled for the month and year and puts HTML tags around the appropriate bits and organises the pages into the file structure I described.
Writing a piece of software that you really want to use opens up a world, where you become invested in exploring the many ways this task could be accomplished. I have found one solution to making a website, but I am aware that there are other ways I could do the same thing. I could move the data around my program in a different way or try using the coding language differently. Because of the way I keep track of my code development with git I can branch out and try things, all of it monitored and recorded in fine detail.
Writing a program to manage my website has an added advantage which is that I can use the organised information to make other things, for example some Really Simple Syndication or an RSS feed. An RSS feed is a way to let you, an interested party, know when new things become available to read on the site. By choosing an RSS feed reader and adding the object group RSS feed a feed reader will regularly check for updates and let you know if there are any new additions by providing you with a link to the relevant part of the site.
There are a few other details of the website that I haven't mentioned here, like the styling and the tool I have made to ensure every part of the website is under version control and my plans to add images to the site, as they seem to require a post to themselves. Which is something to look forward to in the future.
I've been taking an A3 page and drawing a horizontal line across it. People who teach perspective in videos on the internet call this horizontal line a horizon line. Then in the middle of the horizon line I pick a point (people call it a view point or point of vision) and I draw a vertical line through that point at ninety degrees to the horizon line. I get a big cross on the page. From a point towards the bottom of the viewpoint line I draw two lines that fan out at 45 degree angles until they cross the horizon line. And that is the framework I'm using for exploring one point perspective.
People who teach perspective in videos on the internet say that drawing cubes or boxes is a good way to develop your skills. I like the technique by Dan Beardshaw for drawing perfect cubes in one point perspective. The method uses a scaled line for the width and height of the box. For the depth of the box you extend track lines, one from each corner of the box, to the point of vision. These track lines are the sides of the cube but they extend back to the horizon so you need to work out where they end on the cube. To work it out you draw a line from one lower front corner to the opposite 45 degrees point on the horizon line. Where this line crosses the opposite track line for the bottom of the cube is where the cube ends. Drawing horizontal and vertical lines to the other track lines from this point forms the back face of the cube.
After drawing a few boxes with this method I wondered how I could make a perspective box within a perspective box, so that the box could look open at the top and has chunky sides. This would be useful for drawing, say, raised beds in a garden. Happily I worked out a way. Within the outer box base you draw a cross from the left front corner to the back right corner and from the front right corner to the back left corner. Then draw one horizontal line within the cross along the front of the box and use the point of vision to draw the edges within the cross and join these two points up with a horizontal line along the back of the cross. So in conclusion perspective involves lots of crosses.
Over the last month I put some more work into the arctic fox story that I shared last December. I like this story because it describes a journey simply taken. The journey was long and in hard conditions and a young fox did it. The original scientific paper describes how the fox lived in one place only exploring a little area, did an incredibly big journey pretty much directly and then she lived in another place exploring a little area. I wanted to tell the story simply too. Just things the fox would have experienced.
For the new version of the story I found photographs, maps and diagrams of the features of the fox's journey. I printed out a picture with accompanying explanation for each part of the journey on pieces of paper about the size of playing cards and gave a suggested order of reading by numbering them. The result was a sort of nature documentary you could lay out on a carpet.
The pictures influenced what I included in this version of the story. I added a few new things like a map of the pattern of the sea ice around Svalbard showing the warm sea currents on the west that meant that the fox had to travel north east to find sea ice to leave the island on which they were born. In the first version of the fox's story I included a section about arctic krill and their vertical migration driven by faint arctic light over the fjords of Svalbard. For the second version of the story I instead described the light that defines the arctic circle from the way the Earth orbits the Sun. I also included in the new version the bioluminescent plankton in the fjords of Svalbard because there is a brilliant photograph of this. I kept the way salts in the sea ice form crystals of cryogenic gypsum that hold together after the ice melts because there is a brilliant photograph of the crystal formation. I added a section about frost flowers that form when warm sea water hits cold air and by chance the wind doesn't disturb the ice crystals that form and intensify with sea salt, and the salts can be released into the atmosphere when winds do break off the crystals. I also added pictures from maps of the places where the fox travelled including a photograph of Greenland taken from a NASA mission showing the ice extending off to the sea. I gave this new version of fox's story as a gift and it went down well.
Last month I said I would put together a page of links to comics artists that mean something to me. Well this is who I have picked for a start.
I chose Sweatdrop Studios because this comic collective keeps appearing in my life in good ways. It started several years ago when I went to Cambridge central library to borrow books and the artists from Sweatdrop were exhibiting on the library's top floor. The artist Chen Xi, who I already knew through a friend, was exhibiting with them. Later I went to Chen Xi's book launch in Waterstones and we both remembered the friend we had in common in a nice way and I bought and enjoyed her comic book about other people's dreams. Then on the 6th June 2016 I went to a 'meet the publishers' day at the cartoon museum in London where Emma Hayley who is the founder of Self Made Hero talked about her best selling publication at the time: a series of manga Shakespeare. When Emma had the idea for manga Shakespeare she searched the internet for suitable artists to make it real and the result was that members of Sweatdrop Studios drew the comics.
For American artists I chose John Porcellino and also Ron Rege Jr because years ago when I was just forming my cartoon taste I bought McSweeney's issue thirteen which is an anthology of cartoonists and it came wrapped in a big Chris Ware cartoon and folded in that wrapping was two little comic books that looked to have been printed on home printers or at a copy shop. One was by John Porcellino and the other by Ron Rege Jr. I have treasured these books for many years, checking what these authors were up to every now and again and more recently with the wider internet and mechanisms for their readers to support them with subscription models, John and Ron's work has been more visible to someone like me.
Another American artists is Kim Deitch whose intricate story telling as fascinated me for many years now.
And that's my March update. Next month I would like to describe how I made my website.
Now I see why Hans Holbein the Younger put that stretched out skull in The Ambassadors. He had a technique, in his case Anamorphosis, and it seems that he wanted to use it no matter what. I have been learning some drawing techniques lately, one is how to draw patterns of linked curves and it is so satisfying that I want to draw linked curves on all my comics no matter what. When I feel this way it is usually time to stop looking for new techniques and start applying what I know. As it stands I can draw in one, two and three point perspective and I can make some nice curved shapes with a compass and ruler. So this month it is time to start applying some of these techniques to settings in the comic story I'm currently drawing and ease off of learning (too many) new ones.
I went to the Norwich University Fine Art Student show in The Undercroft and there was one artist exhibiting at the very far end of the gallery who had a ring-bound folder full of castles and cavernous halls and stairways inhabited by lots of different people all hand drawn in pencil on printer paper. This student had made a world of their own with a brilliant enthusiasm and it was a good reminder that passion does come through when someone sets their imagination free.
I thought I would share a little bit about how the comic I am currently working on came about. The Stilton story started by being about fragile knowledge and a home that doesn't work. It was one of the first things I wrote where the setting created the characters and the characters created the setting. One character responds to being in an uncertain world with a driving enthusiasm to solve problems, using all the tricks at their disposal to bring a little group together shaped by delicate knowledge that mostly disintegrates as it is touched leaving only what holds true. Another mouse balances the safety of being alone with a deep love of showing others how to do things for themselves. One mouse explores the art of suggestion partly by accident. One mouse explores the dangers of the world through dreams that span the entire story. Another mouse has had strange experiences that they are trying to reconcile. All the characters are trying to understand their situation and each other and it this interconnection in the story that I really enjoy.
That reminds me that at the end of last June I went to MaccPow comic festival. The organiser Mark has been building up MaccPow for the past ten years and that's what it takes to make a vibrant small comic scene. They don't exist unless someone with passion commits to building something where nothing existed before. This personal website is a first step of building something as a cartoonist. I committed to making this site as easy to maintain as possible and it seems to be working, there are still many improvements but the basics are here. A next step I thought could be to add a web ring for a small comic community. I have seen some nicely designed web rings or link pages that look manageable so it seems right to give it a try.
Once I was drawing with my nephew and he invented a new character called Ticking Pup: a puppy dog with the face of a clock. The character came out great the first time he drew it, so my nephew went about filling in some background details. He drew a room with a chest of drawers and then realised that all the drawers and all the handles of those drawers were so boring to detail when you have a character, like Ticking Pup, sitting right there ready for an adventure. I can relate to wishing that a background would just fall into place like it does in life as you are simply living.
Then I think about how it feels to read a comic or watch a movie. The first movie I ever watched, the very first movie I sat down, watched all the way through and enjoyed, was Splash at my friend's house. It was amazing to see the apartment building Tom Hank's character lived in and the department stores he shopped in and the restaurants he dinned in. As a kid who grew up in a tiny village with a four mile drive to the shops, Tom Hank's city life was just as new and amazing to me as Daryl Hannah's portrayal of a mermaid. My friend had successful parents and they had just moved to a much bigger house. Her mum, who owned a fabric shop called Dress and Design (chic), had decked the place with the most beautiful soft furnishings that mesmerised me and I saw the first computer in a home, it was a beige BBC micro with an owl logo in dots that my friend's dad had invested in, in his capacity as a headteacher. So my senses were overloaded with new places that day and it felt really good. Since then most films and comics I enjoy are because they transport me to new places through attention to detail and great execution of backgrounds.
I mentioned before that I need to come up with a home for the mice in the Adventures of Stilton comic: my comic about risk taking. I like the ideas behind this circle house that was designed by Steven Holl and Dimitra Tsachrelia. I like that they built spaces inside the house like a section of a sphere in the living room making a sort of bay window only visible from the inside and that the windows in the bedroom floor mean that light shines through different levels of the house. For the story I am telling I need the house to be mysterious and having shapes you might not ordinarily expect is part of that. I have several ways to draw a basic box-shaped room. But to make it more interesting I have been trying some shapes cut into the room. There is no shortage of good techniques for drawing shapes, like I found this great way to draw an isometric sphere and I found this very pleasing way to draw an egg. These shapes are subtly nicer looking than guessing by eye. So my challenge is to draw some curved spaces in the straight lined room with nice weighty thick walls and unusually placed windows. I'll let you know how I get on.
