Getting the Gist: Hard Edge of Empire II

Completing my visual exploration of Charles Stross' essay The Hard Edge of Empire. I really focused in a particular paragraph that presents the concrete realities that would accompany a mundane steampunk society. I wanted to create an illustration that a reader would instantly recognise as springing forth directly from the life and world Stross imagines for us, concentrated down into a single narrative moment that still relates to the overall tone of the essay. The real readers and writers of fantastic fiction are presented here with the hidden underbelly of the heroic worlds they read about: a mere imagined downward pan of the eyeline reveals that science adventurers and gunslingers are supported by an iniquitous system that has been willfully ignored. While the privileged heroes are left distant and anonymous, the oppressed look us right in the eye.

"empty-headed graces of debutantes raised from birth to be bargaining chips" close observation of period costume and machinery were important in shaping both the specific visual design and tone of the final illustration.	"the empty-stomached anguish of a young prostitute on the streets of a northern town"/ "fading eyesight and mangled fingers of nine year olds forces to labour on steam-powered looms" the crippled mother and children were the most important group, the most challenging and ultimately the least successful.
"forget wealthy aristocrats sipping tea in sophisticated London parlours"	"casual boiled-beef brutality of the soldiers who take the King's shilling to break the heads of union members" many choices I made, from cropping the faces of the upper figures to strongly splitting the composition and colour scheme are intended to 'pull focus' away from the commonly aristocratic concerns of steampunk to the cruelty of their society & the less fortunate masses

~

in progress

final

Getting the Gist: Hard Edge of Empire I

Though I'm rather stretching the brief the editorial I've chosen is author Charles Stross' essay The Hard Edge of Empire, in which he decries the divorce of modern 'steampunk' fantasy fiction from the harsh realities of the Victorian world it hearkens back to. As with the previous history of illustration exercise, I immediately saw something that I wanted to express and what I could add to the dialog of the work. I want to express Stross' idea that no matter how romantic the trappings of a fantastical age of 'science adventure' may seem, an honest appraisal would require much more attention to be paid to human suffering & brutality. For that reason, and because of his clear links with Dickens whom the author references I'm being influenced somewhat by Hogarthian moral images of human life swirling together in a chaotic mêlée of interwoven incidents.

a strongly divided and vertical composition seems vital for communicating the ideas of oppression & hierarchy

the main challenge I'm working on is to create a set of plausible character vignettes

History of Illustration: Rob Ryan (b)

History of Illustration: Edward Bawden (a)

sketchbook, recently

11th Sept. Figures are always a favourite of mine, especially to start a new sketchbook

12th Sept. Ditto animals--loosely from this photo

13th Sept.

14th Sept.

15th Sept. A few thumbnail thoughts

Influences-Katsuhiro Otomo

from Memories

 Thanks to someone donating Memories and Domu to the local library they were my first exposure to comics outside of US superhero books and Alan Moore and David Lloyd's superb V for Vendetta. Where Moore deals with intertwining Machiavellian schemes, carried out with ambition and cunning by masterminds, Otomo's worlds are invariably about fallibility. His characters are often clueless, propelled by accident rather than design: a senile bully with psychic powers, a horny drop-out teenager fallen foul of the government thanks to chasing a terrorist to ask her on a date, a recipient of unasked-for powers that are slowly destroying him. The very studied banality of the protagonists make the fantastical scenarios he casts them into more plausible, as does his visual style--though to a certain extent Katsuhiro Otomo's 'style' as a whole is somewhat elusive, because the mammoth proportions of his larger works (dystopian sci-fi saga Akira stretches to 2000+ pages over about 8 years, leaving an average of less than a day and a half per completed page!) would have been impossible without a bevy of assistants rendering architecture and applying tone.

from Domu

A studied rebellion against the highly formalised and stylised Tezuka-derived manga of the 1960s, Otomo seems as much influenced by contemporary film and ligne claire as by japanese illustration or comics of the day. Rather than archetypal generic features, splash panels and plentiful speed lines he creates drama and tension with clean, empty space and low-key exactitude. The crucial distinction between totally empty and richly described space that he mines so deeply has influenced a long line of mangaka descendants, like Akio Tanaka's delicate hatching and tranquil, almost surgically precise drawing of isolated hands and feet in violent seinen karate drama Shamo. Shards of glass, collapsing buildings, shabby high-rise housing estates and monstrous mutations are all investigated with a fine, sensuous and relatively unvarying line, drawing the viewer into a deep, textured environment. Rather than emphasising characters his protagonists are minimised, made indistinct and thus made both sympathetic and integral to their world.

from Akira

Here is an interesting article about his technique as seen by a manga artist, and here a brief discussion of one of his earlier works.

In 1988 he adapted & directed an animated version of Akira, which along with Gainax's first feature Wings of Honneamise (a kind of alternate-earth re-telling of the space race) is one of the world's outstanding technical works in the medium of animation--reputedly some scenes in Akira were keyframed so densely that there was no room for in-betweening. It also sparked significant opportunities for animators; Koji Morimoto and many of Studio 4°C's other key talents, who would go on to animate Tekkonkinkreet, cut their teeth on Akira.

'The City'

study for an imagined book cover

Pencil, ink, scissors & glue. Inspired by seeing a few over-literal dummy book cover illustrations, and wanting to investigate more varied media. Playing with texture, salting, silhouettes, &c

Sketchbooks, recently

wolves, after Yoram Shpirer, 2009

 

snake charmer, after Tancrède Dumas, 2009

figure studies, 2010

 

 sketch for linoleum print, 2010

linoleum print, 2010

Triptych

Working to a brief to illustrate three major influences on three 21x21 cm panels, I elected to connect the three together as a canted L-shaped triptych, uniting the city of Venice (in particular the Ponte Vecchio), early 20th century illustrators like Rackham & Dulac, and fairytales/myths. Watercolour, gouache, pencil and acrylic ink. Looking back on this piece I reget being over-timid with my use of colour and not uniting values more effectively.