composition – Page 2 – Gerry Mooney Illustrating Dickens

Miss Flite’s Birds

She partly drew aside the curtain of the long, low garret window and called our attention to a number of bird-cages hanging there, some containing several birds. There were larks, linnets, and goldfinches–I should think at least twenty.

“I began to keep the little creatures,” she said, “with an object that the wards will readily comprehend. With the intention of restoring them to liberty. When my judgment should be given. Ye-es! They die in prison, though. Their lives, poor silly things, are so short in comparison with Chancery proceedings that, one by one, the whole collection has died over and over again. I doubt, do you know, whether one of these, though they are all young, will live to be free! Ve-ry mortifying, is it not?”

My Dickens Portrait

Charles Dickens is probably one of the most photographed men of the mid-19th century. There are also tons of portraits, etching and paintings. I knew at some point that I would be doing a portrait of him myself. It was sort of a given. With hundreds of photos available, good reference material was not a problem. The thing is though, in those days, photography didn’t allow people to smile!

Ada, Esther and Lady Dedlock

The weather had been all the week extremely sultry, but the storm broke so suddenly—upon us, at least, in that sheltered spot—that before we reached the outskirts of the wood the thunder and lightning were frequent and the rain came plunging through the leaves as if every drop were a great leaden bead. As it was not a time for standing among trees, we ran out of the wood, and up and down the moss-grown steps which crossed the plantation-fence like two broad-staved ladders placed back to back, and made for a keeper’s lodge which was close at hand. We had often noticed the dark beauty of this lodge standing in a deep twilight of trees, and how the ivy clustered over it, and how there was a steep hollow near, where we had once seen the keeper’s dog dive down into the fern as if it were water.

Ancient Japanese woodblock set

The final, 12-color print and one of the woodblocks from this incredible set.

As I’ve been exploring the world of hand-made printing techniques of various kinds, more and more I find myself looking at, investigating and writing about woodcuts. There’s a good reason for this, apparently!

The Ghost’s Walk

Mrs. Rouncewell, Rosa, and Watt Rouncewell

She seats herself in a large chair by the fast-darkening window and tells them: “In the wicked days, my dears, of King Charles the First–I mean, of course, in the wicked days of the rebels who leagued themselves against that excellent king–Sir Morbury Dedlock was the owner of Chesney Wold. Whether there was any account of a ghost in the family before those days, I can’t say. I should think it very likely indeed.”

Mrs. Rouncewell holds this opinion because she considers that a family of such antiquity and importance has a right to a ghost. She regards a ghost as one of the privileges of the upper classes, a genteel distinction to which the common people have no claim.

Mr. Krook

As it was still foggy and dark, and as the shop was blinded besides by the wall of Lincoln’s Inn, intercepting the light within a couple of yards, we should not have seen so much but for a lighted lantern that an old man in spectacles and a hairy cap was carrying about in the shop. Turning towards the door, he now caught sight of us.

‘Hi, hi!’ said the old man, coming to the door. ‘Have you anything to sell?’

Chiaroscuro Woodcuts

As a rule I’ve stuck to just one-color linocuts mainly because my printing setup at the moment is fairly primitive. What I want to talk about here is going to be about woodcuts, but the same rules apply to linocuts and the process of pulling prints.

The main thing to solve when doing more than one color in a hand-pulled print, is getting the colors to line up. In any multi-color printing process, this is called “registration” and it applies to pretty much all color printing, whether it’s magazines, cereal boxes, or your inkjet printer. You know when you put a new ink cartridge in and you have to print out that one sample page? That’s so your printer can register the colors.

Proofing with a rubbing

I haven’t seen this method of proofing on any other linocut websites (and there are quite a few!) but it may be because I’m always trying to squeeze more detail out of a fairly “coarse” medium.

This video goes into the process of proofing with a rubbing, in order to see what is actually cut. Since the process is to do a black line drawing on the lino, then cut away everything else, it’s often difficult to “see” the cut areas clearly as work progresses. The rubbing reveals all this easily.

Allan Woodcourt and Jo

‘Stop him, stop him!’ cries the woman, almost breathless. ‘Stop him, sir!’

He darts across the road into the boy’s path, but the boy is quicker than he, makes a curve, ducks, dives under his hands, comes up half-a-dozen yards beyond him, and scours away again. Still the woman follows, crying, ‘Stop him, sir, pray stop him!’

Mr.Tulkinghorn and Lady Dedlock

“Lady Dedlock?”

She does not speak at first, nor even when she has slowly dropped into the easy chair by the table. They look at each other, like two pictures.