| This was an eye-opener. Chris's end products are books, so reproduction (copying and printing) is fundamental to the process. Most of us are trying to produce original paintings and look on the copier and the computer as tools "unworthy of an artist". Whatever we may feel, there is no logical reason to avoid them in Chris's situation. |
I don't know what he calls the finished product, but he is not
averse to running off several copies of an ink or pencil drawing, hand
colouring them individually to suit the whim of the potential purchaser and
finally framing and selling them. On the same lines, do you remember |
 |
Examples of Chris's earlier work showed meticulous draftsmanship
and realism in watercolour and acrylic but once he started publishing his own
books he realised that colour reproduction was prohibitively expensive. Other
problems he mentioned included colour distortion in the printing process,
particularly its exaggeration of yellow ochre, and the difficulty of painting
plants like agaric (red mushrooms) which change colour faster than you can mix
the paint. The drawing of the Redwing, left, was scanned out of a 1988 publicaion of his. |
| His strong interest in botany and the early centuries
was shown in his books, all written in an enthusiastic, informative and
slightly whimsical style, with titles like "Valuable Garden Weeds", "Horse
Chestnut" and "Strewing Herbs". Well may you ask, by the way. Strewing herbs
are herbs strewn on the floor or the fire to fight such things as bad smells,
moulds, insects, bacteria, evil spirits and the "little people" (elves etc)
. This second image, right, shows the effect of adding hawthorne leaves to the original redwing. |
 . |
 |
Most of his illustrations are now in black ink or pencil. Where the grey of the pencil is too pale he uses the computer to blacken it. This may be particularly important where a central object and a background, both already drawn separately, are to be superimposed. Sometimes a particular drawing is changed tens of times: redrawn; computer processed or having extra detail added to fill blank spaces. Sometimes this is for artistic reasons but sometimes, for example, a Saxon expert may tell him,that he has drawn a breed of creature or a type of clothing that was not found in Surrey at that time. |
| The third image, above, shows the effect of imposing
the previous one onto a piece of hawthorn tree (from a 1999
publication). It is destined for his current project, a book about what Surrey looked like in Saxon times, 5th and 6th centuries. Most of his slides were chosen, like this, to show how he builds up the illustrations and integrates them with the text in such a way as to give the book a coherence of style. |
Various "artistic" hints emerged: put skies at the top of the page and ground at the bottom; get texture by putting your paper onto the patio before rubbing with chinagraph pencil; draw outlines first where light objects (grasses, say) are in front of a darker centre of interest (so you can work between the lines), consider washing the top layers of printer ink off under the tap (giving a particularly interesting effect if you've printed on a textured paper like Bockingford). |
| We were fascinated by his sprinkling of little insights
into Saxon life: the value of sage to kill moulds, how young boys built a
reputation of agility and daring by climbing elm trees to catch young rooks for
food; that Saxon pigs apparently had no saturated fat; that rhubarb leaves had
not yet developed their poisonous nature and that green cloth was very
expensive because it needed dying twice (they had blue and yellow dyes but no
green ones). A great evening. I look forward to seeing the book this autumn. Sam Dauncey |
 Elm, the Ancester of all women |
Top of Page - Home - Programme of Events - Gallery - Contacts - FCSA Site Map