CREATING MISS MUFFET

I recently created an experimental piece that was inspired by a character in a colleague's manuscript. I began as usual with one of my "rag doll" figures, roughing in the character's pose, and the physical setting.

My next question was, what does this little Miss Muffet look like? I tried her first as a mouse. That didn't feel satisfying.  

I tried her again as a little humanoid. She immediately came to life for me!

Although I usually create my art using only pencil, pen, inks, paints, and paper, this time I turned to my computer for some of the steps.  Here, I've scanned both Miss Muffet and the original sketch, and then replaced the rag doll figure with the Miss Muffet figure, using Photoshop.

I printed out the sketch, and worked on it further with pencil. The paper I used was an inferior grade of paper, which gave a slightly blurred effect that intrigued me. I often use an inferior paper when experimenting and trying out new ideas. It seems to free me up from any worry about "wasting expensive paper," and it allows me to make as many false turns as I want or need. Inferior paper also often gives unexpected results, as here, which I can later use deliberately in creating a piece.

I scanned and printed out the reworked sketch, and colored it with watercolors. Scanning and printing out the sketch obviously gave me the possibility of easily making several trials, experimenting with different palettes, and even different media, for the color.  Rescanning and printing out on the inferior paper also gave a pleasing blurred effect to the whole piece.

I liked my little Miss Muffet enough to put her on my most recent promotional postcard. Even as I publish this post, she is winging her way across the country to my list of art directors and editors. Bon voyage, Miss Muffet!

PROMISE

Hope is emerging wherever I look.

Buds, springing from bare branches...

...expand gently, floret by floret...

...into full-blown racemes.

Ideas, too, seem to spontaneously bud...

...open up...

...spread wide their petals into the complete and fragrant vision.

Later will come the fruit.

MEANINGLESS

I keep a small notebook and pencil under my pillow to capture all those brilliant ideas that show up in the middle of the night.

I can pull out the notebook, jot down my inspirations without even opening my eyes or turning on a light, tuck the notebook back under my pillow, and resume sleeping with hardly a moment's interruption. In the morning I open the notebook, remove the inscribed pages (which surely will be filled with gems of insight), and file them in the appropriate places.

The other morning when I opened the notebook to see what my midnight unconsciousness had produced, this was the page that awaited me. Yes...one word: 

"cucumbers" 

I had no idea what I was thinking...what the word meant...what the brilliant thought could possibly have been. The appropriate spot in which to file this gem was clear: WASTEBASKET. 

Reminder for the day: Some things really are worthless.

SOMETHING'S MISSING

This little Oaxacan goat family recently arrived in my mailbox---I ordered them from the National Museum of Mexican Art, in Chicago. My parents had a dairy goat herd when I was a child, and I have a special fondness for those animals, so when I heard of this work of art, I could not resist. But when I unwrapped the figures and set them up...something was missing. I didn't know what.

Adding to the mystery was a separate little parcel containing..."Of course! Tails!" I thought. I'm familiar with these wooden Mexican folk art creatures; many figures have detachable tails. 

Except these goats were sitting down---there was no room for a tail. Nor a place to attach the tails. And besides, this is not what goat tails look like. "The museum made a mistake," I decided, and I wrapped up the tails and mailed them back. A few days later I received a phone call from the Museum. "We did not make a mistake," said the Museum."Those are not tails; they are..."

..."horns!" And suddenly, something was no longer missing. Just so, in creating a piece of art, there is that one small element or addition that---sparked by some stray comment or idea---can make all the difference.

TRIALS

No, not that kind of trial, involving sweat, tears, blood, and suffering. Rather, trials as in "trying-outs". Experiments. When I am starting on a new book, I often make multiple trials of the media I might use. Sometimes trials will involve ink, pencil, or paints. Sometimes they involve the paper, as in these examples.

For the trials in these photos, I cut samples of 8 different papers, and applied brush and watercolor in the exact same way to each paper. Going from left to right in the photos, I labelled my trials: "Wash", "Scrub", and "Drybrush." Wash is a straight watercolor wash. (Note that under this "wash" sample I wrote "pimples as it goes on." This paper was disqualified immediately.) Scrub is what I sometimes do with the brush if I want to remove some color. (This is also a good test for the resiliency of the paper under multiple washes and re-workings.) Drybrush is using the brush with watercolor very dry, so it acts almost like a colored pencil. (Another note: the different color of some of the drybrush samples here is a trick the camera played. In real life they are the same color as all the other samples.)

These trials were preliminaries to the illustrations for "The Cats In Krasinski Square", a picture book written by Karen Hesse. Such trials can be tedious and time-consuming (if for example one needs to let them dry overnight) but they are always worth the time and trouble. And they are just as valuable whether one is working with hand tools or on the computer. Much better than finding out mid-illustration or mid-book that one's media are not up to the task.

And sometimes---if the media insist on behaving capriciously, or one is unable to find any media that satisfy one's inner vision---these trials can in fact become "that other kind of trial". Such is the life of the conscientious illustrator.

CHAOS II

Once again, I am in chaos, a dark and murky jumble, where all is confusion and disorder:  I am beginning a new project. The physical chaos mirrors the mental chaos with which I begin any new project, whether as an illustrator or a writer. As encouragement, I frequently remind myself that in many creation myths, even the Great Creator began with chaos.

I try to trust that I, too, will be able to separate the light from the dark; that I, too, will be able to gather and form and shape disparate elements into an ordered universe. In other words, that I will be able to create another book.

NO LINES!

So much of my work combines line with color and tone. I've recently challenged myself with a new assignment: create images, either in color or black-and-white, using no lines. NO LINES ALLOWED.

(At least, no lines allowed in the final. I wouldn't know how to compose without using lines.) I began with the scenery for this particular image. Every artist has his or her own method. If the background and scenery for an image has any complexity, I like to work that out first. It's like creating the stage set.

Then I add the figures. I can easily place them, choreograph them, rearrange them, however I like. As usual, I put each element or figure on a different layer of transparent vellum, making it easy to shift positions. This eliminates the need to re-draw...re-draw...re-draw. As I've said so often, this is exactly the same process one would use with, say, Photoshop on the computer---working in layers. I just happen to prefer creating the layers with a pencil and paper.

After some experimentation, I decided to execute this composition in pencil on vellum---a surface that has a nice tooth for pencil. (Working surfaces being pricey, I did my experimenting on a partially used piece of vellum---the outlines of a lawn chair that you see are from another project.) I also tried a couple of different pencils before settling on a Koh-i-noor Kunstlerqualitat Negro #3, a tool that I have loved for years. (This pencil is no longer manufactured. Fortunately for me, I stocked up on them years ago, and figure I have enough for the rest of my lifetime---and perhaps beyond.)

Because this was a relatively new way for me to work, I kept pieces of scratch paper next to me, and experimented frequently with ways to handle various parts of the drawing. A foot coming at you, seen slightly from below, is always tricky for me.

The finished drawing. I decided not to use the checkerboard pattern on the floor that I had originally visualized. Too complicated, it seemed, for the very simple approach that had evolved.

I decided to use the final drawing for one of my promotional postcards, so I drew a little fir twig in the same style for a decoration.

The finished postcard. My experimentation gave me a double return: a new technique that I might use in a future illustration job---and a promotional piece for December.

CHAOS

I never seem to be embarrassed to let people see how messy my studio becomes. I think it's because I am always awed and amazed at the way a beautiful object is created out of such chaos. An object that one can pick up, hold in one's hands, peruse, read, enjoy. The process seems to me---still, after all these years---nothing less than miraculous. It confirms for me, over and over, my sense that I am the channel for the creating power, not the source.

I do clean and straighten my studio after each project is completed. A moment of stasis.

Then begins the next project---the next round of chaos. Out of which, yet again, will emerge a thing of beauty. 

And thus the magnificent cycle continues.

BOOKPLATE

Occasionally I am offered a small, non-book illustration job. This memorial bookplate was one of those small jobs, and as always, I enjoyed the change of pace and the creative freedom that it gave me. The only restrictions I was given were the dimensions of the bookplate, and the text that was to be included.

Initially I came up with this very rough composition. The blue line indicates the outside dimensions of the plate. My sketches, if left to their own devices, would always be very rough---even sloppy, by today's standards. I never like to get very detailed in a sketch. For me, laboring over a sketch and filling in all the details at that stage takes away from the spontaneity and liveliness of the finished art. It's hard to believe this now, but many years earlier in my career, I sometimes did not even send sketches to an editor before going ahead with finished art. Publishing has changed dramatically since those days! At any rate, I knew that my finished bookplate art would be much more refined than my sketch...

...but my client was not as comfortable. So I made a new sketch, very clear, defined, detailed. (Again, by my standards. Many artists make sketches that are far more detailed and finished than mine.) I felt there was too much empty, unused space around the children's legs in the first sketch---a little boring. So I made the dog larger and sat him on the floor instead of on the bench; and I added the two mice. In the old days, these are changes that I would have made as I was preparing my work surface and laying out the composition in pencil, in preparation for painting and inking; the only difference then was that I would not have created an additional, separate sketch. And the refinements would have happened as I was actually inking. To me, that is the joy of creating. If I have worked out every detail ahead of time, then the inking and painting are, for me, simply copying, not creating. 

So my client was now comfortable with the sketch...

...and I could proceed with the finished art. I did not end up hand-lettering the text, as I had suggested. Instead it was added as type by the client. Again, in this day and age, the hand-lettering was probably just too "hand-made" in its appearance. Bookplate---a very satisfying job for me, and a nice change from book illustration.

STEAM ENGINES

This is one of the double-page spreads I created for "The Cats In Krasinski Square", written by Karen Hesse, and published in 2004. It's a large piece, 24" wide, and executed in pencil, watercolor, and ink. The story was challenging to illustrate, set as it was in Warsaw, Poland, during WWII, and dealing with the hardships of Jews, both in and out of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Since the story was historical fiction, I relied heavily on photographs to construct my illustrations. When I had roughed out this composition, using xeroxes of photos and my own very rough figure sketches, I showed it to my dad, Aldren A Watson, the well-known illustrator who was my professional mentor until his death. Dad looked at my compostion for several minutes, clearly uncomfortable about SOMETHING. Finally he said, "You've got an American steam engine here, not a European steam engine." 

 As it happened, my father was not only a terrific artist, but an expert on old trains. (And just a note: I learned that American steam engines had cowcatchers at the front end; European engines had bumpers.) He sent me sketches, photos, and books of European steam engines, as well as historical information about the manufacturers of steam engines, indicating which kind of engine was likely to have been in Warsaw in 1940. Thank goodness he caught this mistake---I'm not sure if anyone else would have seen it until it was too late.

I began to revise my sketch. It was hard to find photos clear enough for me to see all the details of wheels, drive shafts, and other mechanical parts. "Just add a lot of steam" my Dad said. We artists know about "adding steam". Sometimes that's a cop-out; other times it's a practical solution. As my son always said about film and the stage (and equally applicable to illustration): "We're creating an illusion of reality, not reality itself."

On a separate transparent layer I next worked out very carefully the arrangement of the clouds and steam behind the engine.The separate layer avoids messing up any drawing on other sections of the compositions.

Next came the figures of the pursuers...

...and of the pursued.

I combined all these layers into my master sketch. I carry out this process with transparent vellum, but the process is exactly the same if one is doing it on a computer.

And voila (after 4 days of painting and inking)---the finished illustration.