mooney2021

Online Drawing Class

As an artist I’m always looking for ways to keep my skills sharp, and regular life-drawing classes are a must if you’re drawing the human figure. Nude models, of every size, shape and age, are the rule, but let’s face it, in the practice of our art we’re almost never drawing naked people, we’re drawing people with clothes on.

iDickens

As you probably know, the internets contain everything known to humankind, and Charles Dickens is no exception. In my research over the years on this particular project, I keep finding websites and blogs devoted to the man and his works, and I would like to share just a few that I find myself visiting over and over.

I’m not opining on any of them, as they each have their strengths and they are all worth visiting. Some, like the Charles Dickens Museum, are websites for particular places in the real world, while others are compendiums in and of themselves. For the most part I’ve picked up text from their “About” pages, and some I have invited to submit a paragraph or two to expand on their mission statements.

“Spot Illos”

So in doing magazine and book illustration for a few decades, I picked up a couple of technical terms. For example, an illustration is called an “illo”, a sketch is called a “ruff”, and a deadline is called a “#!!@! deadline”.

Illos done for print are termed by their size, and from biggest to smallest are called a spread, full-page, half-page, quarter page, and spot. Spots are fun because they are usually simple, a quick visual read, and they don’t necessarily have to carry as much narrative weight as a full-page does.

Research Sketching – Buildings

Research sketching is one of the most important steps in doing any historical illustration work, and that requires good reference materials. In the years B.C. (Before Computers), any illustrator worth his or her salt had a “morgue”, or a collection of photos filed in boxes or file cabinets, usually alphabetically, of any or all things in creation because you never knew what you would be called on to draw.

My four-drawer file cabinet is long gone, but I saved various reference books, including a couple of books of old wood engravings. For the most part pre-dating photography, these books are amazing for the sheer breadth of their content.

Free Ebook Download!

This fully illustrated ebook contains the first seven chapters.

I’m extremely happy to announce the completion of the next step in this monumental project: A free, no-strings-attached ebook download of the first seven chapters of Charles Dickens’ great BLEAK HOUSE.

This is intended primarily as a calling card and proof-of-concept for my ultimate goal, a hard cover print edition of the entire illustrated novel.

As you may have discovered, I am smitten with this book. I began work on it in the Spring of 2019 and have been working on it nonstop since. With the completion of this sample, I will be continuing work on the monumental, 57-chapter novel, as well as continuing to post here on a regular basis.

This ebook in pdf format can be read on any computer, device or reader. There’s no sign-up, no email harvesting, no obligation of any kind. I hope you enjoy it.

BleakHouse_Dickens_Mooney Download

Lawrence Boythorn

“You have brought your bird with you, I suppose?” said Mr. Jarndyce.

Mr. Vholes and Richard Carstone

Richard’s high spirits carrying everything before them, we all went out together to the top of the hill above the village, where he had ordered a gig to wait and where we found a man with a lantern standing at the head of the gaunt pale horse that had been harnessed to it.

Research Sketching-Costumes

My favorite part of doing any kind of historical or genre art is researching the appropriate costumes. In my magazine illustration days it didn’t come up much; mostly I was drawing doctors, nurses, businessmen and contemporary kids and grownups of all kinds.

With subject matter like Dickens, costuming the characters not only correctly, but in a way that tells us about their personalities, is part of the job description!

It’s the Little Things!

As I mentioned in the post on Miss Flite’s birds, I had a bit of an epiphany when I started laying out a sample eBook: I discovered that as a reader I wasn’t as interested in the detailed, heavily-researched full page illustrations I’d been slaving away on, as much as wanting to see smaller, spot illustrations tucked into the text.

A fence-stile that connects two estates whose owners are in a perpetual war over rights-of-way

BLEAK HOUSE cover illustration

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes–gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.