| Home
¦ Features ¦ Arthur
Ranson Interview Part 3
There
have been some extraordinary high points during your career at 2000AD –
The Jesus Syndrome, Button Man Book II and Shamballa are my personal standouts
– but what has been your particular favourite?
When visitors ask
what I do and I want to make the best impression I can, I show them the Satan
and Button Man books. The Satan collection also contains The Jesus Syndrome which…
I do like but I am having trouble using the word “favourite” for anything
I have done. In Satan there is a drawing of Cass Anderson as she would look if
she accepted Satan’s offer to become his slave/companion. I think that is
my favourite drawing of Anderson (see later in this interview for more!)
Now, a
word about your technique, which I’m going to introduce with a quote from
Angus P Allan, writer of the Sapphire & Steel and Dangermouse series: “One
of the strips featured the 'ghost' of a French naval lieutenant of Bonaparte's
time, and Arthur included drawings of me. The balding head was perfectly shown!
He could have done it perfectly well off his own bat, but he always felt himself
dependent upon that damned Grant Projector.” I’ve also seen other
critical references in reviews of your work to a “lightbox”. Could
you explain how this system works, and how you came to use it in your art? What
are your other tools of the trade (reference books, etc), and how much of what
we see is photo-ref and how much is imagined?
A Grant Projector
is a piece of equipment which projects an image up onto a glass plate, on which
one places tracing paper. A focus enables the image to be enlarged or reduced.
Practice enables a very accurate line drawing which is put onto one’s working
surface by blue chalking the back of the tracing and going over the pencil line
with a stylus. The result is a thin blue outline. This is then used as a basis
to transform into form, light and shade, colour, in whatever technique one chooses.
A Grant does not
do the drawing for you but when it is important, a portrait for example, it does
make accuracy possible – though not inevitable: I have seen other people
try it and fail. With the watercolour on smooth hard board technique I used for
illustration, the fine chalk line will just vanish, which a pencil line would
not. It also means the surface of the board is not disturbed by pencil indentations
or rubbings out, essential if colouring with water colour on hard or soft board.
 |
Judge
Anderson (The Jesus Syndrome)
|
|
As an apprentice
stamp and banknote designer I was trained to translate photographs into watercolour.
In stamp size. I hated every minute of it, but, hey, it’s a skill. Since
it was a rare ability at the time when I went self-employed, it was my selling
point as an illustrator in advertising and publishing. My first work for Look-In
was painting portrait covers. My first strips were funnies but going on to strips
using actors from TV series it seemed important that the characters looked as
much like the actors as possible. I felt the audience was owed that. I used the
methods I knew.
Then the accurate
likenesses called for realistic backgrounds and I was on a treadmill. Whether
I was doing a salt cellar or naval destroyer I had to make it accurate, though
my attitude to precision has altered of late. I never liked those illustrations
where a snake was a generic snake rather than an actual one anyway. What would
Button Man look like with an unidentifiable gun? So yes I have a collection of
reference books and a library card. And for a Christmas present I’ll have
a picture book thank you.
Occasionally, I
have made models of characters and things that I will use as reference to photograph
or draw from.
How do you go about turning a script into what we finally see on the
page?
Do you find this
stuff interesting?
- Read the script.
- Do a small page
/ frame breakdown. On tracing paper, referring to the script, rough out a page
layout scheme. Tracing paper for original and reference based design. Some drawing
on sketch paper which I will trace.
- Chalk back of
tracing, trace drawing onto board using a stylus (old fashioned drawing implement,
a metal “pencil” with sharp point) leaving fine blue line outline
on board. Felt tip liner for frame borders.
- Do inking, adding
bits undrawn directly with ink.
In the past I traced down the whole page before I inked, but now, flibbertigibbet
that I am, I draw and ink one frame at a time for entertainment’s sake.
Nobody else could do inking for me since there is so little on the page to go
from. This method carries its risks. A face, for example, might be just an oval
with indications of where the features go before I ink. If my hand and eye or
the pen knib fail to come up to standard it can be buggered, but the idea of laboriously
inking over a pencil drawing makes my head hurt.
Having a split personality, the actual inking style can be inconsistent, going
from more to less formal depending on the subject matter or whether I am more
interested in a loose or tight technique at the time.
Knib quality makes a difference too. Although the knibs I am using are the same
make I have always used they are less flexible than they once were so make for
a different approach to the drawing. Looking at what I drew today I wonder if
I might be changing my approach more and more deliberately as I quite like the
new look. Whether anyone else would notice I don’t know.
- When
the story is completely inked, clean off with putty rubber.
- Colour using big
fat sable brush with a fine point and water-soluble inks.
- Go back over the
lot to check and usually add more bits of black ink, to tighten up drawing and
blacken the blacks. My natural pen line can be too fine at times.
- White poster paint
to clean up borders between frames.
- Put in post after
getting colour copies. Copies so I have references to colours and stuff I did
last week. And in case the Post Office loses the originals.
 |
Judge
Anderson (Shamballa)
|
|
Now you know how
it is done you can all do it. One word of warning, none of the materials, knibs,
ink or board are as good as they used to make them. I can no longer get the coloured
inks I preferred, they seem to have stopped making pen handles for the kind of
knib I use and knibs that used to last until I had worn them down I now have to
repeatedly replace because they have such crap points. Don’t get me started.
To work I also
need Café Crème cigars (don’t try this at home), tea, CD player,
Radio 4.
2000AD
fans who don’t rate your work particularly highly often comment that it’s
“just photo-reference” (and one or two have gone so far as to nickname
you “Buzz Lightbox”!) How would you answer this criticism?
Buzz Lightbox.
Good joke.
Just photo-reference?
Do you imagine that makes it easy? Try it. Ask any of the other artists that use
it. And where do you get photos of Judges or demons? We are not doing pen-and-ink
versions of Casablanca or Terminator here. There are things wrong with my comic
strips but using reference isn’t it.
My lightbox / Grant
projector fell to bits some years ago. I don’t believe they are manufactured
anymore. I now have a thing that projects images onto the wall. It is not nearly
as precise as a Grant but I use it if it helps or saves time.
Often, all I get
from a reference is just an odd shadow on a face or a pose one would never invent
and build on that. What things really look like interests me. And what anyone
looks like changes all the time. The same face seen or lit from many different
angles is a fascinating thing to try to represent.
|
