This week sees me bouncing back and forth between here (an unlovable town in the Bedfordshire area) and Newcastle.  I lived in Newcastle for about a decade, and I’ve always found it odd that people in the south exclaim surprise about my casual visits to that city. “Newcastle!”, they proclaim. “I’ve never been past Stevenage!”, despite there being the usual range of transport options. I’ve literally lost count of the people who say this to me, despite it being about half-way up the UK’s length.

This is a picture of the view from Byker, which had a unique architectural estate, the Byker Wall, built sometime during the 1960s. My great-grandparents used to run a business in the area, which was purchased off them and bulldozed to form this mega-estate which my friend now lives in. The amazing panoramic view shows the Baltic in Gateshead, where I used to work, right up to the hills near Consett (I could only squeeze a little of the view into my notebook, as I was quite busy).

Let’s talk about how I did it.

Firstly, I had to get hold of the source material – namely, pages 46 to 50 of volume four of Akira. I them printed them off at A3 size (or, rather A4 size but stuck together with scotch tape) and used a lightbox to trace the panel layout onto some nice watercolour paper I had lying around.

I don’t like my lightbox, and I wouldn’t recommend it as a purchase to people – it’s a sheet of electroluminescent paper which I got through a specialist supplier. It’s not quite bright enough, so I’m using very light watercolour paper here.

Click more to see a huge pile of images and musings on this process:

I left the heads of the figures undone, and then went back and drew their Simpsons counterparts on top of them. Sideshow Bob was my favourite to draw, as his villainous features really fit the role he was playing. However, I really struggled to get Todd Flanders looking like he was angry and/or in pain, which meant a lot of redrawing. I regretted using the heavy-handed pencil marks I started off with, which had put deep groves into the paper.

However, one panel which worked perfectly was a shot of Tetsuo/Milhouse looking over his shoulder:

Milhouse looks like a badass in this image. And that’s because, in the Bartkira narrative, Milhouse IS a badass at this point! He’s killed a lot of people, destroyed the city that he lived in, started a gang in the ruins, and taken control of most things around him. I figure these are slightly older versions of the characters we know from the Simpsons, and that as Milhouse is no longer a nice guy, I didn’t draw the little dots that appear on his glasses as eyes.

Having penciled in the images, I inked the lines on top of the pencils I’d done. For this I used a Tachigawa G-Nib and Speedball black ink, both of which were amazing to use. The G-Nib is a fancy dip-pen nib from Japan, which is miles better than the bullshit nibs you buy over the counter at art shops, and the Speedball black is an Indian ink with extremely fast drying times. I still managed to smudge and mess things up, and the process of drawing with a nib pen is actually pretty hard. I mean, physically hard, as it’s harder to drag the nib over the paper.

To do the edges of the panels, I used this line-drawing tool. It’s a variable width line inking pen, and it’s incredibly messy. I could have just skipped this and done the lines in Photoshop, but it was the first ink I did, and it probably helped me when drawing later on. Milhouse, for instance, looked awesome, and I wanted to see what it would look like finished:

After I’d finished doing all the line-work, which took a few days, I scanned in the pages to the computer at 600dpi/black and white. I was worried that I wouldn’t have time to finish the work, and it would be an easy thing to colour the pages digitally. Thankfully, I managed to press on, and painted all the pages using watercolour and ink combination.

The first thing I did was put black ink in the areas I wanted black. As I was doing this, it occured to me that it was just the sort of tool that Photoshop was for, but I was about half-way through a panel. I made a note to slap my forehead when I wasn’t covered in black ink.

Right up until this point, the project was a bit of a drag. And then I started applying colour with my brush and things seemed loads better. I actually wanted to do the project again! And I only had to watercolour these pages, and then scan them in!

I was very surprised to find out that this was the half way-point. Once I scanned the images in, there was a whole Photoshop process that was exceedingly complicated, and it’s hardly worth me going into. I’ve been experimenting with Photoshop this month, using it on a trial basis, and the Bartkira stuff has unexpectedly proved a great run-through for what I could do with it. It was miles above the previous software I was using, and I suspect that it’s worth paying the £20 a month to have it (under the new ‘creative cloud’ scheme, where you rent the software for a monthly fee, like a phone charge).

The stuff that I would change, if I was doing a project like this again, is actually the inking. If I’m going to spend so much time in Photoshop, tweaking and adding things, putting in a layer of ink in a laborious dip-pen style just doesn’t make sense. I’m not sure if digital drawing is something that I’d want to do in the future, as it never quite ‘pops’ for me in the way that hand-drawn stuff does, but using computers to merge watercolour and line art is certainly on the cards for a future project.

At this point in the story, Springfield has been destroyed by the awakening of the most powerful psychic child, Ralph Wiggum, and everybody is living in the sort of horrible post-disaster situation that people in Hartlepool deal with daily. Milhouse is wacked up on drugs that give him psychic powers, and has a robot arm (under his cape). I had free reign to cast whichever characters I wanted in the small parts, and so the three nerds from “Homer Goes to College” have a walk-on role as drug guinea pigs (it doesn’t end well for them – just say no to psychic powers, kids!). I figure life in the desolate hell-hole that Springfield became has toughened them up a bit, Also, they might be holding hands in that panel on page 50. I’m not going to judge.

As it currently stands, these five pages are the most “finished” visual artworks I’ve made, and I’m going to write another blogpost detailing some of the process (check back on Friday!) for how I made them. It was a long process, involving printing things out and selotape and watercolours and lots of Photoshop. I’m probably going to spend the next few days drawing flowers to recover.

Hey! So, remember two weeks ago when I put up some watercolours I did, based on Japanese painting? Here’s some more!

I’m doing these watercolours in a small, expensive notebook I brought. It’s got the best watercolour paper I’ve ever used, so I have a sort of mental block about using it, and this project is an excuse to do some work in the pages. It’s going pretty well. Above is the first picture that I thought worked, a copy of “People Walking Under Cherry Trees at Night”. The original piece is a study in perspective – still a new and interesting thing to Japanese art. For me, this image turned into a test of brushwork.

This second drawing wasn’t so successful, but I managed to get the gradation of colour in the sky. Hiroshige was a master publicist, and he sold these prints to people at shops conveniently located at the busiest intersections on the way out of Edo’s drinking areas.

This drawing didn’t work, and I realised that the shapes were just going to be too complicated for me to draw at this size. I’ve included it because it shows that a) I’m not an amazing artist and b) sometimes you just got to know when to fold.

Hello again! More comics. This comic uses visual repetition to make a joke.

Comics are a very labour-intensive way of telling a story, and I don’t feel like spending *all* of my available time drawing them. Even this scrappy effort took quite some time and thought to make legible – and I’m not happy with the way that final panel turned out. On the other hand, I’m happy to be telling this story, which started last week. I might go back at some point and fix up these pages.

Also, after last week’s post, I decided to send an email to that ex and apologise for being a massive jerk. In fact, “massive jerk” is probably underselling it. I was a howling fantod of jerkdom, and could probably write several voluminous novels on how much of a twat I was (working title: “In Search of Lost Twatiness”). Surprisingly, she also apologised to me, so it was like some kind of mutual karmic slate being wiped clean. Phew!

To be fair to Ms. E (featured above) I was extremely rubbish at this point in my life.

Anyway, I’ve made some comics about things what have previously happened to me. At some point my parents will read this. I hope they NEVER mention it to me. OK, thanks.

Last month, I started a project I’d been thinking about for a while; copying the works of Japanese printmaker Hiroshige, using my watercolour paints. The first attempts, above, show what happened.

The first two goes I had were terrible, and I could have given up and gone off and done something else with my time. But the third attempt seemed to almost work…
The fourth attempt, a print called “Geese Descending Over a Bay” and/or  ”Full Moon over Takanawa” (depending on what country you live in) showed me what I wanted to do. It isn’t perfect, but the sense of distance created by the curving bay, and the use of colours, kind of reflected what Hiroshige was doing.

 One of the problems of watercolours is when the paper doesn’t absorb all the water quickly enough, and the pigment dries in this sort of ridge (left). Japanese prints often use a sort of gradation effect, called bokashi, and trying to replicate this in watercolour was very difficult. Good practice though!

Next week, I’ll put up some more of the watercolour copies I’ve done. I didn’t want to put them all up at once, as that’d be overkill. I’ll also talk about why I’m doing these.

Next week I’m off to Edinburgh, so I thought I’d do a blogpost about what I carry with me when out sketching.

1. Expensive watercolour sketchbook. This notebook was so expensive I was actually scared to use it for a bit, but it has excellent-quality watercolour paper. You can do several watercolour washes without the paper turning into mush.
2. Seawhite’s of Brighton travellers notepad. This looks like a Moleskine, but it’s actually loads better – Seawhite’s do a selection of papers and notebooks which I highly recommend. This particular one has a hard cover, so it’s good to lean on when out, and the paper can take a bit of wetting with watercolour or ink. I put a sticker on the front because I have two identical notebooks, which I use for two different types of drawing.
3. Furoshiki cloth. This is a piece of fabric used for wrapping things up. I wrap my sketchbooks in it so that they don’t get all dinged up in my bag. I brought this on a whim, and it’s become one of the most useful things in my bag. I can also wipe brushes on it.
4. This is my pencil case; it’s part of a North Face satchel I brought last year. It detached from the inside of the bag, and I use it to carry around pencils and my watercolour set. On top of the pencil case is another notebook, which is a Fabriano “Venezia” book, which has great-quality paper in it. I like to have a pocket sized notebook for tiny sketches.
5. Six-inch ruler (curved for use with fountain pen) and watercolour set. I could probably write a whole post about my watercolour set; I went to Austria to buy it, enlisting help from friends who spoke the local language. I’ve developed a palette, and like to mix up paint in specific areas. I could probably go down to a smaller watercolour kit, like one of the bijou boxes that are so popular right now, but I’d rather not buy a new one.
6. Water bottle and pens. The water bottle is for both drinking and making watercolours. There’s a spare elastic band around the water bottle, which is used in combination or instead of the clip (also shown) to hold notebooks open. The pens here are a Pentel brush pen (it’s ok) a pair of cheapo water brushes (both large), a 4B pencil, and a Lamy Safari fountain pen with Carbon ink.

I usually carry around most of this stuff during the week, if I’m going somewhere, and at the very least I have my tiny notebook to hand so I can quickly sketch something that catches my eye. I’m constantly trying to get myself to do more drawing, because I’m pretty slack, so making the effort to carry around a notebook is a good push to get me to do something worthwhile with my time.

April’s actually been going ok. After all that time spent sitting around on the couch, I picked up some projects again, and I’ve been working steadily on a few bits and pieces. This is making me feel pretty good! We’ve finally started getting some sunlight here, and I’ve been doing a few drawings outside the house too.

I mentioned a while ago that I had a small show of watercolours at Dot to Dot gallery, in Letchworth. To say thanks, I brought Ruby and Rebecca this bunch of flowers.

Whenever I scan a drawing in, I have real trouble correcting the image. My scanner seems to be too light, and everything ends up looking blown out – dark lines and details suffer especially. To fix this, I tweak the gamma setting of the image that I’m working with, nudging it up a bit so that the picture has some darker shading. It’s not quite a perfect fix, but it’s quick and does almost everything I need. However, you can see on the light green blossoms in the upper right that there’s some detail it doesn’t catch.

If I take it too far, the image ends up with unnaturally dark areas. This is fine in black and white pieces, but when I scan watercolours it’s difficult to know when to stop.