Exercise: Choosing Content

Final image, method below.

The main character would be:

• white, middle aged
• stern, angry looking, steady
• solid, serious, hardened
• brooding, dark, patient
• dogged, slow, formal
• pessimistic, resigned, sad

He would be wearing:

• a suit, dark, formal
• a tie
• black shoes
• a hat, but not inside

The furniture in the office:

• a desk and chair
• a telephone
• maybe a desk lamp, a filing cabinet, a clock

I collected visual reference through an internet search:

• fashion, hair style
• interiors
• colours, textures
• illustrations
• wartime London
• 40's detectives

Sketchbook: Visual reference 1 and mood board

I selected key words from the text:

• austere, bleak, functional, motionless, slantwise, shaft of shadow, derelict, fixed contraction, wartime, anger

From the list, I chose 'bleak' and looked it up in the thesaurus:

• barren, bare, dreary, flat, cold, grim, stripped

I was imagining a man with a shadow across his sad face- angry/sad, not soft/sad. The text says that his surroundings are austere, there's a hardness to the outlines here, no comfort, nothing soft.

This hardness made me think of a line drawing, to accentuate the man's contracted features with cross hatching to convey the monochrome bomb-site textures I had found in my research.

I was also inspired to try a line drawing after looking at the OCA students' forum and being particularly impressed by the drawings of 'Red Dirt' http://oca-student.com/node/71452.

Also, I met a Brazilian artist last week who showed me her sketchbook, which had some beautiful, flowing line drawings of figures. Since then I have tried some figurative line doodles in my sketchbook.

I decided on a limited palette of dreary green, which was evocative of the era and appeared in several images I came across in my search. The green shaded office desk lamp of this period would have given off green hues too.

I wanted to use ink, again inspired by the work of Red Dirt and also by some of my earlier mark making experiments.

So I settled on a combination of Indian ink for the outline, which I wanted to be solid, and washes of water based inks for the background and shading, which I wanted to be more nebulous and dreary.

I collected more images of men from the 40's with their faces partially shaded, as I wanted to place the character sideways, in front of the office window.

Having made a few rough sketches I also decided to draw a fairly close cropped portrait of the character,using his features to portray bleakness and leaving the office and its furniture out.

Sketchbook: Visual reference 2 and preliminary sketches

I practiced the Indian ink and water based ink combination over this pencil sketch:

And traced a line from the larger sketch on this page:

which I then outlined in Indian ink:

Having shaded the line visual with cross hatching, I applied washes of ink to enhance the shading and colour the background.

I made 2 versions.

Version 1

Version 2

I think I've conveyed bleakness quite well in both versions but the man in version 2 looks more angry than the man in version 1, who looks more sad (because of the shading in the eye brow area).

The shirt collar on the light side of both versions is not in the correct position; it should be higher up the neck than the jacket collar.

I prefer the stronger shading, the eye outline and the ink wash on the jacket and the background in version 2 so I'd choose that as my final version.

Next time I would inspect my pencil outline even more carefully for errors before applying the ink as I'm a bit disappointed about the collar position.

I'm pleased overall though.

7.4.12 tweaked collar and colour in photoshop (see top of page)