2022 30x30 Watercolour challenge 1) Disused Station

 Here we are, gentle readers, the one you probably haven't been waiting for, my first direct watercolour of 2022:-

Direct watercolour means that you don't get to do any sketching before you start painting - the only medium you can use for your picture is watercolour. I have to say that I'm pretty pleased with this. In my humble opinion it is actually a wee bit better than it looks here. There's something about my scanner that it just doesn't deal with blues very well, so the roofs and the platform edges really haven't come out as well as they did. So here's a photograph I took of the same, which should give you just a wee bit of a better idea about the true colours of the picture -

As I said yesterday, I know that this isn't exactly world class, but it is so much better than some of the pigswill I've made in previous years of the challenge. 

Now, that looks a lot better, doesn't it.

Nothing to do with Alice

 Yes, I've managed to make a picture that has nothing to do with Alice. I belong to a Facebook group that gives you a different prompt every day - you can respond to it or not, there's no pressure. To be fair, it was a prompt on this group that eventually led to the Alice fixation - Sir John Tenniel was a daily prompt a long time ago, and that got me started. Today's prompt led me to make this: - 

I mean, we're not exactly talking old master, here, but we are talking progress to at least some extent. It looks close to what I was aiming for. Which is nice, because the 30x30 challenge for 2022 starts tomorrow. 

The purpose of the 30x30 Challenge is to produce 30 Direct Watercolours by the end of the month of June. Direct watercolours are those that you produce just using watercolour, with no pre-sketching and no other media involved. I've completed the challenge for the last couple of years - and last year I even sold 8 or 9 of my 30 paintings. Well, if that should happen this year, well and good, but just completing the challenge will be enough for now. 

Hmm - not quite what I was aiming for.

 

Yes, this is my second attempt at an Alice in Wonderland illustration. My first was the gryphon, but to be fair, that was a little bit of a soft option. Not because it's easy drawing a griffin, it isn't, but if you see what I mean, it doesn't necessarily have to come from Alice in Wonderland. But a caterpillar smoking a houkah - no, that can only be Wonderland.

Good points - the mushrooms and grass are pretty well realised. I wanted to give the caterpillar the sort of opium - raddled old Victorian colonial face, which is why he is wearing a smoking jacket and a smoking hat. His face is not at all badly realised. But if we're being critical, I wish I'd either gone for massively oversized glasses, or half moon specs. 

Other 'I wish that I'ds' . . . I wish I'd made the houkah bigger and placed it a little further up on the mushroom. I wish I'd either made the head smaller so as to be in proportion with the body, or even bigger to make it obvious that I was trying a Tenniel-esque out of proportion head. 

By way of comparison, here's a copy of another of T.H. Robinson's illustrations, also of the caterpillar.

Here we are, then.

To coin a phrase, the time has come. In this case, the time for me to make my own Alice illustration. In the end I decided to have a go at the gryphon- hopefully you can tell this from looking at the picture.

I am stupidly pleased with this – because, and this is not meant to be false modesty – when I make my own pictures when I’m not copying someone else’s, and not drawing something that I can actually see – most of my own drawings are utter pigswill. Yes, there are things about this that could be better, but pigswill it is not.

Ironically, after pointing out the static quality of the majority of Tenniel’s Alice illustrations, this is far more static than his gryphon. Also, being critical, there’s a slight disconnect between the lion and eagle parts – the latter being slightly too big for the former. I do like the rocky beach I’ve put him on, though.

I went back to Carroll’s text before starting. What he actually says is “They very soon came upon a Gryphon, lying fast asleep in the sun. (If you don’t know what a Gryphon is, look at the picture.) Getting a little meta-textual there, our Lewis. Mind you, if you knew that you had someone as good as Tenniel illustrating your novel, then you’d surely be tempted to say something similar yourself, I’m sure.

It's maybe not perfect, well, there’s no two ways about it, it’s not perfect. However it is decent enough to encourage me to seriously think about doing more.

How do you get away from Tenniel?

I am thinking about trying to produce my own illustration based on Alice in Wonderland or Alice Through the Looking Glass. Over the last 6 weeks or so I’ve made copies of almost forty illustrations of the  books by various artists. It’s time I had a go at putting my own stamp on it.

However.

There are a couple of problems. The first sounds like false modesty, but it really isn’t. I don’t have the skill of being able to conjure up good illustrations off the top of my own head, purely through my own imagination. John Tenniel had the most incredible visual memory. I don’t.

The second problem is one which has faced every other illustrator of the books since John Tenniel, namely, how do you get away from Tenniel’s illustrations? It’s a fair question. One way of doing it that we’ve seen over the last couple of weeks is to do something completely different. For example, Mervyn Peake’s frankly evil looking Cheshire Cat. Which is doable because nobody actually knows exactly what a Cheshire Cat should look like.

But how do you get away from Tenniel when all logic dictates that what you draw must inevitably end up looking similar? Well, here’s my copy of Tenniel’s Fish and frog footmen.

Let's compare it with my copy of a Mervyn Peake illustration of the fish footman. 

Superficially, they're pretty similar - similar costume with the breeches, the wig and the long tail coat - similar letters. However Peake manages to put his own stamp on this partly through having very minimal - almost non-existent background - and partly through depicting the fish running. One of the things I've noticed about Tenniel's illustrations is that the vast majority are static. Even some of the ones where characters are moving are strangely still. Off the top of my head, there's one from Wonderland with Bill the Lizard shooting out of the chimney, another with the Hatter storming off with his hat over his eyes, and in Looking Glass there's the Red Queen flying along with Alice in her wake. Other than that though the characters are often standing, or sitting, or striking poses. So depicting characters in movement is an option for getting away from Tenniel

This is one of Arthur Rackham's illustrations. Again, superficially the frog footman looks to be at the very least a close cousin of Tenniel's. As with Peake, there's a contrast with the way that Tenniel uses background in his illustration. Rackham could do very detailed background and I always felt that his depiction of forests and trees is masterly. Here, though, the background is extremely sketchy, especially when compared with Tenniel's. I don't think it's coincidence that Rackham chooses to depict the frog sitting, while it is standing stiffly, almost to attention, in Tenniel's. 

So, drawing a few lessons together from this, I can get away from Tenniel by firstly, thinking about the conception of the characters themselves, but also by thinking carefully about the way I use background detail, and also the positions of the characters, and the amount of movement in the picture.

None of which answers the question, though - if I am going to have a go at an Alice books illustration, which character or scene from the book am I going to have a go at? 

The Remarkable Robinsons

In my last post I said that one of the artist illustrators I most wish had made his own illustrations of Alice in Wonderland was Aubrey Beardsley. I copied the Ralph Steadman illustration that accompanies the Wool and Water chapter in Looking Glass which I believe owes a little to Aubrey Beardsley. I also mentioned that there’s a wonderful illustration by Charles Robinson which I believe also owes a debt to Aubrey Beardsley. I’ve spent several hours today doing my best to copy it. This is the best that I can do.

Charles Robinson was one of three artist brothers born in London. He was the middle brother, although there was less than four years between all three. His older brother was Thomas Heath Robinson – and we’ll come to him in a minutes – and his younger brother, William Heath Robinson was probably the most well known of the three. Wiliam Heath Robinson is remembered for his remarkable drawings of fantastical inventions, and any contraption which seems to be cobbled together from an assortment of ill matched items is still often labelled a ‘Heath Robinson’ contraption.

In the last day or so I’ve looked at quite a few illustrations by Charles Robinson, and I’m pretty sure he was influenced by Beardsley. As for this illustration, made for a 1907 edition published by Cassell, I think it’s remarkable. Alice looks positively demonic! I also think that the ripples in the water – which I presume is the pool of Alice’s tears – and the reflection of Alice herself – are a real tour de force. Look at illustrations like this, and you can understand why this period is known as the Golden Age of British illustration.

Thomas, professionally known as T.H. Robinson, also illustrated Alice in Wonderland, just a year later than Charles did, in 1908. The illustrations that I’ve seen aren’t quite a startlingly magnificent as the Charles Robinson illustration that I copied, but they’re not without their appeal. I like T H Robinson’s caterpillar, and I really like the original of this sketch I copied of Alice opening up like a telescope, and being called a serpent by a pigeon. I think that the viewpoint is brilliantly chosen.

Who do you wish had illustrated the Alice books?

I’ve given a bit of thought to the question – of all the artists who have never to my knowledge illustrated the Alice books, which ones do I most wish had done it? I love this sort of question, and always when I come up with one, I start firming it up with rules and conditions. In this case I decided that the choice must be limited to only artists and illustrators who have been working at any time since 1865, the year of the publication of Wonderland. Strictly speaking I should possibly say only those working since the copyright ran out and anyone could have a go. Since this precludes one of my choices, though, I’m going to make 1865 the cut off point. My first choice, then, is a rather obvious one.

Sir Quentin Blake

I mean, it’s such an obvious choice, isn’t it, that I couldn’t help thinking that surely Sir Quentin must have illustrated the Alice books at one time or another. But if he did, I haven’t found any evidence of it whatsoever. Although he has illustrated the Walrus and the Carpenter for a book of poetry, anthologised in aid of the Children’s Trust.

It's interesting if you compare this to the equivalent Tenniel illustration.

 

At first sight they look very different, but look closer, and maybe you’ll agree with me that Sir Q., as I’d like to feel he’d let me call him, is actually drawing quite strongly on Tenniel, or at least paying an affectionate homage. Walrus on the left, carpenter on the right. Both sitting on the rocks. Big cliff on the far right. The oysters in both pictures seem to be very close cousins as well.

Sir Quentin is in his 80s now, and still going strong. He’s indelibly associated with the works of Roald Dahl – a couple of years ago when working my way through 50 great British illustrators I copied an illustration from “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, the first Dahl novel I ever read. For me it’s difficult to think of Roald Dahl’s books without thinking of Quentin Blake’s illustrations – as writer and illustrator they were an absolutely perfect match. Then, in the last decade, his illustrations have become the 'face' of David Walliams' extremely popular books. However, Sir Quentin’s portfolio is much wider and more varied than that, and I can’t help thinking that his quirky, expressive and individual style would make for a very interesting interpretation of the Alice books. His style looks deceptively simple. Yet when you try to make a copy of one of his illustrations you start to realise just how clever and precise it actually is. No single pen stroke is wasted, and as a result all of his pictures crackle and sparkle with life and personality.

Aubrey Beardsley

Hear me out. I know that his illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s Salome, as an example, ooze sexuality. That is not something I am advocating should be brought into the Alice books. But I think he’s fair game since, although Aubrey Beardsley was very much not a children’s illustrator, he did at one point illustrate an edition of the 1001 Arabian Nights. And furthermore. . . he was a genius in my book. Effectively his career lasted about 6 years, before his tragic early death from tuberculosis at the age of 26 in 1898. For the later part of that career he was often vilified. However his work is now more popular than ever, and his influence on artists, and graphic designers ever since, and especially since the 60s has been frankly immense.

Looking at this famous image from Salome that I copied you can see some of the hallmarks of the Art Nouveau style of which Beardsley was an innovator – the elongated liquid forms, for example. But look at the way he uses monochrome – this was not years ahead of his time, but decades. I first came to know of Beardsley and his work when I was 17, and studying my English A levels. (A levels are/were the qualifications you needed to pass in England and Wales in order to gain a place to study at University). One of my fellow students was not, frankly, great at English, but he was a superb artist, and he told me about basing his final project on Beardsley. When I researched this name which I knew nothing about, I too fell instantly under his spell.

Maybe I’m being fanciful here, but I do think it’s possible to see the influence of Aubrey Beardsley in some of the representations that have been made of the Alice books since. I haven’t yet made a copy of a brilliant – if rather disturbing – Charles Heath Robinson illustration from 1907 which I think owes something to Beardsley. Still this is a copy of Ralph Steadman’s illustration for the ‘Wool and Water’ chapter of Looking Glass. The water at the bottom of the picture is one obvious comparison, but it also seems to me that Alice's arms in particular are elongated and the liquid way that Alice's hair spreads into the water seems pretty suggestive of Beardsley to me. I do know that Ralph Steadman contributed to a BBC documentary about Beardsley as well in the past, so I think it's reasonable to suggest he may well be a fan.