As He Would Draw It

 '...He falls to such perusal of my face

As he would draw it.'

The mask former

          Starting with a quote from 'Hamlet', eh? Sure to knock 'em dead.
          I was very struck by those lines when I first read 'Hamlet' as a teenager.
          I spent a lot of time drawing then, often from life. I knew that, although you might think you were closely observing something, you never really looked at anything until you tried to draw it. The relationships of one part to another, the density of a shadow, the texture, the angles, the precise delination of a curve...
         The curves of the Oseberg or Gokstad ships will break your heart. I know: I've tried to draw them.

The Oseberg Ship

          Was Shakespeare an artist, then, as well as a playwright?
          But what really brings on these thoughts is my Green Man project. I wrote here some months ago that I'd woken up one morning - without ever having any such thought before in my life as far as I can remember - thinking: 'You should make a Green Man mask out of papier-mache.' And then my brother posted that he'd had much the same thought at about the same time.
          Those sort of things tend to stick in your head.
           I've been busy, and haven't actually ripped up one bit of paper for the Green Man, but I have been thinking about him a lot. A lot. And one happy side-effect of this has been an increase in the intensity of my observation. When I go out for a walk now, it's not just a bit of exercise in the fresh air - it's research.
          I'm perusing things as I would make them.
          I'm noticing the different veinings and textures of leaves. Some have plump, pillowy leaves with grooves between the veins. Others are flatter and smoother, but grained. There are pinked edges and smooth edges. Hazel leaves are almost circular, not 'leaf-shaped' at all.
          I'm noticing the different ways they spring from their twig or stem; how they grow in rosettes or spirals.

          I'm studying, with great interest, the dead stalks and seed-heads standing in the hedgerows. I've always enjoyed the brilliant red berries, but now I'm seeing how many different shapes of them there are.
         I imagine botanists and gardeners enjoy this pleasure in just looking all the time. Perhaps people fascinated by other things do too - people who're enthralled, say, by the study of beetles and other small cattle. But it's a pleasure I'd mislaid somewhat since, all those years ago, I used to stare at things, pencil in hand, hard enough to bore a hole in them.
          Whether or not I can reproduce any of these leaves and things remains to be seen - but even if I can't, I'll still have enjoyed this renewed pleasure in just looking. Dying leaves, lemon yellow with splotches and spots of green. Bramble leaves of a deep, glowing maroon red, that you'd think could never be natural, but is.

          In the meantime, I'm approaching the Green Man with due caution, by having a trial run at something else, just to see what I can learn. I'm using a cheap plastic mask (top) as a form. Can you tell what it is yet?

          The big news of the week, as far as I'm concerned, is that my agent says that she's enjoying Sterkarm 3, and will be in touch soon, with notes.

          She also says she found it confusing, in parts. It's not just me, then. I'm hoping she'll figure it out, and explain it to me.

          And Blott's back! So's Ashteroth...

Brother Blott

          The older brother who does the artwork for my covers was introduced here, at Authors Electric a few days ago.

Brother Adam, at the PriceClan Xmas do

     The brother who does the Blott cartoons is Adam, the younger brother, who is left-handed and, virtually from the time he could sit up, showed a strong abiiity to create in 3D.

     As a toddler he was never without a lump of soft plasticene, and astonished me one day, when he was about 4, by showing me a model he'd made of our budgie. It could have served as a silhouette for a book on identifying birds: it was unmistakeably a budgie and nothing else.

Art work: Adam Price

     He wasn't much older when, strongly impressed by an afternoon screening of 'Jaws', he took up his little blunt-ended scissors (which also rarely left his side) and cut, free-hand, a perfect silhouette of a Great White. I was 15 years older, and fancied myself observant, but I couldn't have drawn such a perfectly observed shark, right down to the ventral fins, gills and tail-flukes.

     He'd take the left-over bits of plastic from the airfix planes he used to make, and construct odd, imaginative little robots, with engine-cowlings for heads, bits of fuselage for breast-plates, and long lances of sprue.

     He is still drawing, painting, carving and writing, but I interrupted him to ask, rather superfluously,  How did you become such an accomplished artist?

Samurai and mouse by Adam Price

      Adam: How do you get to Carnegie Hall? - Practice, and being open to absolutely everything you see, being a visual magpie. So if I see a piece of graffitti art that I like I copy it - not the image itself but its way of expressing its ideas. I studied American Indian art and Mayan art and Hindu art and stole little pieces of their method of expression, the way they draw a hand or the fold of a cloth.
      S: How did you get your cartoons published?
      A: It was absolute blind luck. I've since read all kinds of dire statements about how impossible it is to get a cartoon published in today’s market - but I just blithely went ahead, developed a strip based around the pair of armadillos on Noah’s Ark, and sent it round to people. Of course everyone turned it down, but one local paper in Devon said 'We're looking for something with a more local flavour,' so a week later I presented all the same jokes but between two rabbits on Dartmoor! Sold!

     (Adam doesn't mention that a cartoon appeared every weekday, but on Saturdays there was a large spread featuring the bunnies in a rather fine drawing of a local beauty-spot.) 

      S: How did you get the idea for Blot?

Wentworth, by Adam Price

      A: Some time ago I was working on a strip based around a kind of gangly stray cat called Wentworth. Wentworth lives rough and loves music - the bongos being his favourite instrument - and is haunted by the ghost of one of the many mice he has eaten in his lifetime. Periodically Wentworth would be drawn to a particular house where he would spend all night singing (and playing the bongos) to the woman who lives there. When asked by the mouse why he did this, Wentworth would say 'I have to – she’s my mews'. This rather weak pun was where Blot originated and his blank stare and smooth shape was developed from the ghost mouse.  
      S: How do you produce the cartoons?
      A: I've tried a number of ways. I have used a graphic tablet, and various high-tech bits and bobs but I find it’s quicker and more
intuitive to draw Blot on paper in black ink. He then gets scanned and cleaned up, then I colour him on the computer before his lettering gets added.

      S: Is Blott going to be published?

      A: I've toyed with the idea of producing a self-published collection - but I'm so busy with other things.

       One of those things is marriage, in May, to his longstanding partner, Patti, who we all love - hi, little sis! - and we're all looking forward to dancing at the wedding!

No Blott this week - but something different...