CONTORTED PASTA

Sketchdump - September 2017

Sat, 08 Dec 2018 17:06:50 GMT

It's been ages since I've done a sketchdump here, for which I apologise. I've lately been transferring last year's sketches from Patreon (where they are updated much more promptly) to Tumblr, so here is the first instalment of them crossposted here:

( September 2017 )

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The Sea Ice Incident ... again

Fri, 04 May 2018 20:26:08 GMT

Chances are, if you follow me here you've probably seen this on one or more of my other social media channels, but just in case, an announcement of Things Happening:

1. I have put the first seven pages of The Sea Ice Incident up on Tumblr. The whole thing is, as ever, available for free-and-up on Gumroad, but this is slightly more user-friendly for a preview, and means I can crosspost here.

( Six More Pages of Peril! )
As you can see, there are two pages IN COLOUR! In actual fact I've been sitting on those for a while; the latter one needs to be redone entirely because I've since found out it was overcast and gloomy that day, not bright sunshine, but something is better than nothing, and it looks nice if you don't know the FACTS.

2. This weekend I'm having an Open House on my Patreon, which involves me waking up early and unlocking several months' worth of patrons-only posts so you can see the sort of thing that goes on over there. My goal is to get to 100 patrons by Monday – it seemed like a pie in the sky when I started the page last year, but we're only 15 subscribers away, which is awfully exciting and, dare I say, almost doable.

3. If you subscribe before Saturday, i.e. in the next 12 hours [check timestamp], you can get a free PDF of The Best Journey in the World (a.k.a. How I Got Into This Mess) plus the three-page thing I did last month about outliving the people in my head. This will disappear on Saturday morning, so get it if you're gonna!

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The Idiot

Fri, 27 Apr 2018 21:52:46 GMT

And now, an entry for the gallery of deeply inappropriate title graphics:

I don't remember when I first heard the radio dramatisation of The Idiot, but I know it was before I went to work at Disney, because it made me laugh when people there called anything mildly unpleasant "dark." No, no, this is dark. It takes a really brutal turn at the end, but there's plenty of the darkness of the human soul right from the beginning.

I only know Tolstoy and Dostoevsky from dramatisations of their work, but if that's anything to go by, I prefer the latter: Tolstoy is a great observer of people, but Dostoevsky sees through them. In doing so, he makes the genre of 19th-century drawing-room drama – which I tend to find petty and tiresome – into an indictment of that whole world, and thereby much more satisfying.

But what do I know, I've never read the books.

Once upon a time I had an idea to do an art book of "failed adaptations" – Disney-style concept art for hilariously un-Disney properties – where I could learn different styles and apply them to such inappropriate* stories as Lord of the Flies and Fahrenheit 451. When my dreams of working in vis dev died a wholly justifiable death, there didn't seem much point for the exercise, but I still think about it sometimes.
*I still think these would make great animated films; they are "inappropriate" only for the general public's disagreement with that idea. There's no reason animation has to be just for kids!

It's funny, now that I'm doing my former "playtime" (drawing polar explorers) for a """job""", I have to remind myself to play occasionally – there's book stuff I need to be doing, but if I don't have a bit of fun every now and again, even a job as fun and rewarding as that will start to wear heavy.

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And the Painted Ponies Go Up and Down

Thu, 12 Apr 2018 17:51:07 GMT

Yesterday I outlived Taff Evans.

I'd known it was coming for a while – since I first realised he died before his birthday in 1912, and did the math to figure out when I would reach his tally of days – and so managed to produce a short comic idea I've been mulling for a while:

One By One

Given that I probably outlived him sometime in the wee hours of the morning, I was more aware than usual, yesterday, that it was the first day of the rest of my life. It was spent thus:

drawing both real and fictional people at a café on Kings Parade
finishing up with Pennell's letters at SPRI
attending a lecture on a little-known, hilariously dysfunctional expedition
having fish and chips at a snug little pub on a foggy night

If that's any indication of the future, it's a pretty auspicious start.

It's been a very retrospective few months. 2008 was a hugely pivotal year for me, as discussed previously. This August, I will have spent as much of my life away from the family home as in it. It's also five years since everything went down and I emerged, shivering and withered, from the chrysalis of my former life. I wondered at the time what my life would look like when I was 36 ... I could never have remotely guessed where I'd be now. I wish I could tell 31-year-old me how it was all going to work out more-than-OK. She really needed to hear that.

Today I've been cataloguing Bill Wilson's account of the Terra Nova's journey down from Cardiff, as part of my preparation for writing the first volume of the series. July 23, 1910, which I have just reached, was his 38th birthday. They were in the tropical Atlantic and enjoying magnificent sunrises, while their cabins below were too hot to sleep in. His next birthday would be spent in a howling blizzard in the middle of nowhere on a mad quest for penguin embryos. He didn't get another birthday after that.

I wonder where I'll be when I turn 38. And 39. And 39 years, 250 days. That last one will be a much, much harder date to pass than my 40th birthday. 40 is just a number, but having more days than Bill Wilson is hard to fathom, and simply unfair. Oh that I could use them half so well.

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A Portrait of the Artist in the Archives

Tue, 13 Feb 2018 14:07:53 GMT

Another brilliant day full of primary documents

... and abstract chat

... and teatime treats

... so I've been like this for the last 22 hours or so:

And tonight, thirteen years after being introduced to it, I'm going to see the Snarkiest Musical Ever, so the euphoria will probably continue.

I hope this doesn't mean I'm coming down with another cold.

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Silas Wright

Sat, 15 Jul 2017 08:11:42 GMT

To my surprise, this blog missed out on the Silas love on Canada Day ... so here's making up lost time. Longtime followers may remember him as the snarky bespectacled guy in a nightcap, who I drew a lot when Worst Journey was my escapism at Disney; now that I'm doing all this For Real I needed to sit down and work out a proper design for him.

Charles Seymour 'Silas' Wright was the physicist and glaciologist on the Terra Nova Expedition – and Canadian! As such, naturally, he was constantly being ribbed for being 'American'; even his nickname 'Silas' comes from a joke of Birdie's:

Silas struck me one day on the ship as a typical Yankee name and in a happy moment I called him Mr Silas P. Wright of the Philadelphia Educational Seminary. Since then he has never been called anything but Cousin Silas or Silas.

(from a letter home, quoted in Silas: The Antarctic Diaries and Memoir of Charles S. Wright p. 28)

( More drawings and anecdotes below... )

There are so many more anecdotes – like about how Silas was notorious for his prolific and varied swearing, and how he almost invented the Geiger counter, and the time they were sledging across new ice that was still so rubbery the sledge made a bow-wake, and getting carbon monoxide poisoning the second winter, and how he was almost the one to go to One Ton instead of Cherry, and – and – and –

But I've gone on quite long enough already, so those will have to wait for another day.

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Golden Hill

Tue, 27 Jun 2017 17:43:25 GMT

To my great bafflement, it has taken this long for Golden Hill to be released in the US – a multi-award winning highly readable romp through colonial New York, you’d think it’d be obvious, but there you go.

Anyway, here is the main character, Mr. Smith – I roughed these out last year when I read the book, but have only just made them as pretty as I’d like.

Do give Golden Hill a shot if you like

fun
peril
interesting characters
meticulous research
very satisfying historical fix-it fic

Mr Smith is superficially similar to Moist von Lipwig, which made it a little difficult for me to get a grip on the book at first, because I couldn't see into his head as clearly as Moist's (whose internal world is what really sells the book, IMO), but boy oh boy that was totally worth it for the sake of saving the reveal for the end – the sort of reveal that makes the re-read at least as satisfying as the first.

I don't know about you, but I find most of my recreational reading these days ends up being very serious news and commentary about how much of a mess we're in. It's nice to get a break like this and lose yourself in another time and place, without being devoid of meaning.

Supplemental material – including a rather comprehensive catalogue of 18th-century slang – can be found on the book’s T umblr.

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Prairie Winter

Tue, 30 May 2017 16:12:07 GMT

My childhood was peppered with road trips across the Canadian prairie visiting family – the smell of mosquito repellent was the smell of Canada to me until I went to college, and still evokes fond memories of whizzing past grain elevators, finding interesting bugs in the splatter of grasshoppers on the windshield, sitting around the fire pit after a 10pm sunset, etc. etc. The only time I'd visited in the winter was one rather miserable Christmas, in which Edmonton was basking in sweater weather while Victoria – balmy retirement capital of Canada – got three feet of snow. But prior to visiting I'd been filled with horror stories about the prairie winter, mainly of the barefoot-in-the-snow-uphill-both-ways variety, which was probably a big reason why we only visited in summer.

I had planned my big Turtle Island* trip for February because I knew I'd be visiting LA, and that's one of the least unpleasant months to be there (and one I don't mind missing in Cambridge). As it afforded me the chance to get a taste of RealWinterTM at last, I booked a few days with my aunt and uncle in Calgary. And ohh my gosh, did it get me – I only had a couple days to enjoy it as I was unfortunately bedbound for some time with a stomach bug, but for months afterwards I found myself fantasizing about the taste of the frosty wind and how everything just sparkled. In off moments, I still find myself trying to strategise when would be best to make a return trip.

*A name used by several First Nations for the landmass of North America. As it is a) their continent and b) a way cooler name than "North America", I have taken to using it, forgetting that most other people didn't grow up listening to the Turtle Island String Quartet on Prairie Home Companion and therefore are probably deeply confused by my doing so.

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Bushy and Tao

Tue, 11 Apr 2017 11:42:05 GMT

My sister and I grew up without any extended family nearby, but we had these two cats who kind of filled that role in a funny way. We both remember them more as family members than pets, and like to call them our gay uncles.* I sometimes wonder if I've got cat faces mapped onto the part of my brain which is supposed to read human faces – at least, I have a much easier time relating to cats than people, generally; the role these two played in our emotional lives probably has a lot to do with that.

A friend has recently lost her childhood pet, who was also more than a pet to her, which got me thinking about the place these cats have in my life, and decided it was finally time to draw them as the people they were to us, inside. RIP Bushy and Tao; I'm glad we got to know you.

*They weren't actually gay – they were both neutered (if anything, one of them was a towel-sexual) – but they were bachelors living together with some affection, which makes them gay in the eyes of the Internet.

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The Lobster Quadrille

Sun, 19 Mar 2017 16:11:48 GMT

This has been bumping around in my brain for seven years; I’ve only just summoned the nerve to get it down on paper. Apologies to Lewis Carroll, who I’m sure would never have imagined his harmless verse being put to such purpose. And for those who feel the need to inform me just how sick and wrong it is: I know. That's why it's taken seven years. (Though at least a year has probably been tacked onto that span by the idea that I ought to do it Tenniel-style or not at all ... thanks for that helpful suggestion, brain.)

Bill was pretty well acquainted with death; he had serious tuberculosis in his 20s and scurvy on the Discovery expedition, with numerous other close shaves and accidents along the way, so would have looked death in the face a few times, and that brings a person to come to terms with mortality. His thoughts on faith, fate, life, and death are unorthodox but worth reading, if you are into that sort of thing – I was collecting them for a while on ourdailybill.tumblr.com, but Cheltenham in Antarctica, and for a deeper exploration, The Faith of Edward Wilson, are much more organised sources.

In my head, the words go like this. (I doubt Lewis Carroll would have been able to imagine ... that ... either.)

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Bill, again

Wed, 08 Mar 2017 21:46:34 GMT

For the next couple weeks* I'm going to be teaching the brightest of bright young things how to animate dialogue. From my own personal experience, all the lectures about theory can't stack up against watching an actual animator actually animate an actual scene, so I like to have a demo to walk the class through, on which to demonstrate what I'm talking about, and the stages of animating a scene. It also happens to be a great way to work out a design. Last year I did this with Oates; this year I felt Wilson was in most need of the animation-test treatment. Remembering what a fight I had to get anything halfway decent out of him at the end of last year, I girded my loins for battle, but the minute I sat down to draw him he just ... turned up.

So, this should be fun ...

And now I've got him pretty much figured out (knock on wood), I have no excuse to put off any further the re-interpretative illustration of Victorian verse which I've had on my mental back burner for SEVEN YEARS now. Just in time for it, too – it should go up March 18th, or not at all. [slinks off mysteriously]

*When not stuffing my face with pickled herring and the world's best bread, which everyone knows are the real reasons I travel to Denmark

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Tryggve Gran

Wed, 08 Mar 2017 21:29:36 GMT

Next up on the design block is Tryggve Gran. Gran was a lieutenant in the Norwegian navy, as well as one of the first professional skiers. He was hired onto the expedition to teach the British how to ski – the sport was only just becoming popular in the mainstream, and while those who had been on the Discovery expedition had had practice with one-stick skiing, the two-stick cross-country skiing we’re familiar with today was an innovation in 1910.

I’ve only just started reading his published journals, but so far they’re confirming my impression of his being the Legolas of the expedition. His uncanny ease at gliding along on top of the snow only helps with the image.

Gran was enthusiastic about being part of this great undertaking, and optimistic about being chosen to go for the Pole, but things got awkward when Amundsen put his oar in, and for understandable reasons (as he admitted at the time) he had to be eliminated from consideration. Gran was loyal to Scott all his life, which was a long one – he died in 1980.

T. Griffith Taylor led a geological side-expedition to the Western Mountains on which Gran assisted, and in his official report (??!) which was published in Scott's Last Expedition: Vol. II he's hidden this little Easter egg, a ditty written for Gran's 23rd birthday: ( Read more... ) One is left to wonder just how 'unmoral' he might have been ... (Seriously, the official report, Griff?)

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The Best Journey in the World, continued

Tue, 07 Mar 2017 11:15:00 GMT

A few years ago, when the BBC reran the radio dramatisation of The Worst Journey in the World which got me into this whole Scott thing, I made a small comic about the journey I've been on since being introduced to these amazing people and their story. A little while ago, a small gallery in Minneapolis with which I've had some dealings put out a call for art illustrating one's personal story and 'what makes you tick,' which seemed like the perfect excuse to bring the story up to the present and make something of it.

The continuation picks up in 2012, with the culmination of Centenary Fever, and the overseas trip which tipped the balance on my personal status quo:

... and goes three more pages through the changes both internal and external, my shift in perspective and priorities, and acceptance of a particular direction for my life.

Plus three more pages to bring it home, a small but hugely significant passage from Worst Journey (quoted with permission!), and a short suggested reading list should anyone have their curiosity piqued and be heedless of my warning that such material may change their life, too.

Said comic and text have been compiled into a small booklet, which is currently available from the gallery's shop should you wish to acquire one.* The site doesn't say so, but they are all signed!

This foray into self-publishing has been ... "an adventure" ... but I think I might be tempted to do a little more, if there's a market for it. It's strange to think anyone would smile on buying my artwork when I've been feeding the Internet for free lo these many years, but other people seem to manage it, so ...? Any advice on this, or suggestions for what sort of things you'd like to see, would be very gratefully received. With any luck I'll figure out something for North American distribution which will spare you paying through the nose for overseas shipping, something that couldn't get sorted out before the gallery show. (Sorry about that, but the profit margin is tiny on those little books, believe it or not.)

*Given that these booklets have had to cross the Atlantic once already, I'd advise Europeans to hold off for a few weeks and let those on the other side pick up the gallery copies – I aim to have some more local distribution set up in April or so.

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Frank Debenham

Wed, 04 Jan 2017 16:07:32 GMT

Frank Debenham was junior geologist on the Terra Nova expedition, under fellow Aussie T. Griffith Taylor; as such, needing to be where the rocks were (so, not on the Barrier or the Polar Plateau), and suffering a couple of badly-timed knee injuries, he wasn’t included on the major journeys of the Expedition and therefore tends to get left out of Expedition narratives. This is understandable but unfair, as it’s in his diary that many of the amusing character anecdotes are recorded, he was official photographer the second year so the pictorial record owes a lot to him, and it’s thanks to Deb’s vision and curatorship that we have SPRI, which makes understanding and retelling the Scott story so much more possible. In a way I suppose he’s the Horatio of the Scott Expedition – not part of the action, and easily overlooked, but a good, stable, supportive guy to have around, and keeper of the flame.

After struggling so to get a decent take on Crean, I’ve budgeted myself a full week for each person’s preliminary design pass. While I acknowledge there were mitigating circumstances with Bill, I was still concerned that my pace with him was a negative indication of things to come, so it was a great surprise to find that Deb turned up almost immediately I sat down to draw him, and I filled five good pages in two days.

( Deluge of Debs )

The part of me that likes a good story suggested that my ease in drawing him was because he was so happy for someone to be paying attention to him that he was as cooperative as he could be ... but I rather suspect it’s because he looks enough like a Disney prince that he ‘fits well under the fingers,’ as string players like to say.

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Drawing Bill

Mon, 02 Jan 2017 12:59:28 GMT

Dr. Edward Adrian 'Bill' Wilson is, in my humble estimation, the most wonderful person ever to have lived; he is, for certain, my one great hero, and needless to mention my favourite person on the Terra Nova Expedition.*

( Drawing him has proven surprisingly difficult. )

Next on the list is Deb – I've tried him out before but he needs a proper systematic approach – and then maybe Gran; I'll come back to Bill and see if I've shaken off any of my intimidation.

*The others wouldn't mind me saying this; he was all their favourite, too.

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Old Baggage

Tue, 27 Dec 2016 21:59:26 GMT

I made this three years ago – almost exactly, though I don't remember the precise date. It's finally time to leave it by the side of the road, lest I drag it through another year. 2016 may have been cosmically crappy, but 2013 was far more horrible on a personal level. Glad to dump the last of it, and leave it in a year that won't notice one extra turd.

( The Rest... )

It was a very important thing to have happened, and I think I've processed it enough that I've refined it almost entirely into positives – there's a lingering emotional distrust, but let's be honest, that's always been there. Maybe it's just been reinforced a little. I don't know what to do with kindness, it's confusing.

The only lasting bitterness I have regarding this episode is that the parcel in which I sent this sketchbook home, to join the rest of my stuff in my parents' basement, before I moved to the UK, got lost in the mail. As my sketchbooks double as journals, and free me from having to remember my life at all, I feel like I've lost a whole six months – a pivotal six months – and will never get it back. I scanned all the drawings before I sent it, but there's a lot of writing that's gone forever. USPS!!!

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Sketchdump

Fri, 18 Nov 2016 16:15:00 GMT

I've been making sketches all year, and sometimes I remember to scan them, but somehow getting them up onto The Internet is just that one step too far.

Well, I've just got through most of my summer ones on Tumblr, so here they are in one massive post.

( D'Arry's )

( Catsitting )

( King's Parade )

( Back at The Mill )

( Punts and Punters )

( Trinity Street )

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Atch's Handwriting

Thu, 20 Oct 2016 18:04:29 GMT

I've been spending a lot of time with Atch's handwriting lately. It's been awesome and amazing and I feel incredibly privileged to be able to do so ... but it's also a bit like forensic graphology crossed with necromancy. Which is no less cool, mind, just a little exhausting ...

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We are your children, we speak your subtext

Tue, 18 Oct 2016 12:33:12 GMT

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The Unforgving Minute – and the next – and the next –

Fri, 07 Oct 2016 20:11:10 GMT

I'm taking [the rest of] the evening off. I need to buy some pasta.

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Shanties

Sun, 25 Sep 2016 20:36:28 GMT

I've been listening to shanties while drawing polar explorers and, well, things happen. Deb was Australian, see? So funny!

My conscience would like to point out that the album Northwest Passage came out six years after Silas died, so he would not be singing it in 1910, but since when did respect for chronology trump a good gag? Not ever.

Gosh it feels nice to draw something silly again ...

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The Owner

Sun, 28 Aug 2016 07:29:29 GMT

The last of the people I needed to work out for the Mysterious Thing on my drawing desk is Captain Scott. I've drawn him quite a few times before, and been happy with the results, but it always makes an enormous difference to approach things methodically and get really comfortable with drawing someone, so it was worth it to sit down for a couple of days and hash out a proper procedure for him.

As with Cherry (and everyone, really), I will need to do more than this quick study before I sit down to do things For Real, but this is sufficient for moving ahead with the current thing and buys me a head start on further development.

It was also good to reacquaint myself with the phenomenon of Drawing While French – I drew half the heads above, and these poses, while listening to Radio-Canada podcasts in one of my intermittent attempts at immersion, and I'm pretty sure the latter two of these poses wouldn't have turned out nearly so stylish if I'd been listening to English. I don't know why this happens but it's pretty reliable, so maybe I need to commit to this immersion thing and see what it does to my drawing long-term ...

My collection of reference photos is fairly large, and I'm on first-name terms with most of them, but it's still surprising what you notice when you draw off something rather than merely study it. This is a frame from 90° South, in which Ponting had this group (coincidentally four of the five members of the Polar Party) recreate camping routine for the cinematograph – an absolutely invaluable reference source, though none of them would have thought so at the time. I knew it had Scott laughing, but I had never appreciated just how much he's cracking up until deconstructing his face.

"Scott was a subtle character, full of lights and shades," Cherry wrote, and in my collection of photos some aspect of this comes across physically – in some he's a dashing matinée idol (a former housemate, seeing this image on one of my books, asked why Russell Crowe was on the cover of a Scott biography), while in others he looks decidedly impish. He divided opinion, both amongst those who knew him and those who encountered him through his and others' writing later; the only thing everyone seems to agree on is that he was a complicated man. I started out just on the negative side of ambivalence towards him, but as I've got to know him over these last eight years, I have become very fond of him, despite (or because of?) all his faults. He's going to be a tricky character to portray, and to some extent I can't stop people seeing what they want to see, but I hope I can inspire some to give him the benefit of the doubt as I did, and see the man on his own terms rather than through the lens of hindsight.

One last thing: People make a big deal over observation and life experience, but rarely provide tangible examples of why it's important. Well, in deconstructing Scott's design, I noticed his ears were the same shape as these little tiny clam shells I used to collect by the handful when I lived in San Diego, which I can recall so clearly I could draw them as you see above. Somehow I'd never bothered to find out what they were called; now I know they are Donax variabilis. So a random factor of my childhood has influenced my understanding of a long-dead head, and the story of that long-dead head has led to a better understanding of a random factor in my childhood, and life is 0.001% more stitched up.

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Learning to draw Cherry ... again

Tue, 16 Aug 2016 11:59:43 GMT

For the third time now, I've sat down with my photo collection and tried to get to grips with Cherry. I hope doing it properly this time will mean it sticks. He's tricky in that his two dominant features are his proganthous nose and his glasses – it's easy to throw those down on a face that doesn't work right and say 'Ta-daa, it's Cherry!' when you're really just using them to hide your lack of knowledge. (This is precisely what I was doing whilst drawing something else, the awareness of which prompted me to do this study.) But as you see in my notes to myself, if he doesn't look right without his glasses, he's NOT RIGHT – so I've left them off in these drawings, so as to check them against the reference photos more clearly, and not allow myself to lean on them.

As he ended up being more or less at the centre of most aspects of the Expedition, he really needs to have a proper model pack done, but as usual my time is conflicted at present so I can't sit down to do it now. This is a down-payment on the sort of work that needs to happen, in the hope that dipping my toe in now will make it easier to dive in when time allows.

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Brother From Another Mother

Sun, 14 Aug 2016 18:15:42 GMT

I've gone through rather more of Cherry's notes than most sane mortals have done. It seems sometimes as though he was desperate for people to know the facts, and if they were not going to come to him as the obvious source for the facts and persist in willful ignorance, well, he was going to write them down anyway, in ink, in hardbound books, so someday when they realised they were not in possession of the facts he could remedy that situation from beyond the grave, as it were. I know this. And yet I still blunder ahead sometimes without asking him for his side of the story. Someday the lesson will stick.

It's dangerous to identify too much with someone you'll never know and who, chances are, probably wouldn't have liked you very much if you did. But as someone who started saying 'actually' with alarming frequency quite shortly after learning to talk, I feel like I really get Cherry in this regard ...

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The Ballad of Birdie Bowers

Wed, 27 Jul 2016 17:21:11 GMT

Friday is Birdie's birthday. I have this post queued up to go live on Tumblr on the day, but I couldn't wait that long to post it, so you loyal Real Blog followers get a sneak peek.

I make no apologies for the dreadful rhymes you will find in the following. I am immensely proud of every last one of them.

Happy 133rd birthday, Birdie!

And because I am that much of a nerd, full citations are below the cut (along with details of the illustrations).

( Dive in ... )

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