Pre-Raphernalia, Part 2: Revenge of the Sisterhood



I was very honored to be asked to do a cartoon of
Fanny Cornforth for the wonderful (and very funny)
Kirsty Walker for the revised edition of  her book,
"Stunner."

This past year has been a pretty rough one for me. While doing the odd illustration job over the years (and most of my illustration jobs are decidedly odd ) I've held a steady day-job at Borders for 17 years. Yup, that long. Borders at the beginning was a great place for creative types to work and have health insurance and steady paychecks...

Unfortunately that all changed and we all know what happened to Borders as a company.








And we can't say we didn't see it coming. And no, it isn't because people don't like books anymore. But I'll keep that rant for other another forum.

I was fortunate enough to find a new job at a used book store (soooo much better) and a smaller apartment for less rent. As I continued to do my usual color paintings and my webcomic, "Heaven and the Dead City"  http://www.co2comics.com/pages/co2_heaven_and_the_dead_city.html  (shameless plug and the subject of a future post) I was in desperate need of some silliness after the stress and upheaval of  the past year.  My recreational activities usually involve drawing in my sketchbook-- stuff that only I will see and would be too embarrassed to show anyone else.

The Pre-Raph Cartoons nearly stayed there if not for the prodding of some curious friends (you know who you are) who I worked with at Borders who were also Pre-Raphael-philes. (Um... is that even a word? Oh, who cares.) Anyway.  They asked me to put them up on Facebook and we all got a few chuckles.

Then the awesome Grace Nuth saw them and this happened. http://thebeautifulnecessity.blogspot.com/2011/08/this-will-make-your-day.html

Over the past year, I had been a fan of and was rapturously reading many Pre-Raphaelite blogs online (many you will find in the upper right column of this blog). Lurking is probably a better word, since I was too shy most of the time to get involved in the topics and conversations. One of my favorites was Grace Nuth's The Beautiful Necessity     http://thebeautifulnecessity.blogspot.com/  because, among other lovely things devoted to the Pre-Raph world, it was so "Topsy-and-Ned" oriented (and we all know I have a fondness for these two guys.)

Maybe it was an omen of things to come, but I friended Grace on Edward Burne-Jones' birthday. The response to these ridiculous pencil drawings was overwhelming (Grace, being VERY cool, has a LOT of readers) and I couldn't remain a shy lurker anymore. Thank goodness.

One of the things I've always missed about being in college was being around people with similar interests to talk about the things we all liked--- be it art, movies, music, whatever. You had no trouble finding a kindred spirit somewhere. I joined a comic book club in college (I was the only female--a good and bad thing, I suppose) and met a lot of creative geeks like myself. Later, when I hung around people who actively worked in the comic book industry in the early '90's, there was a similar vibe. A type of community of like minds.

Working at a bookstore was the closest thing I could come to the sort of environment that I sorely missed. However, by putting up the cartoons on the Internet and having people actually see them and enjoy them brought me in touch with a lot of new friends who liked the same sort of things I did. We could share pictures and stories and have conversations and discussions... And after feeling artistically isolated, I feel like I'm part of a creative community again.

Maybe even.... A Sisterhood. (Granted, this Sisterhood also includes Brothers.)



I was especially taken by the concept of a Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood and especially Stephanie Pina's wonderful website and FB page. http://preraphaelitesisterhood.com/  The focus was on the ladies. And it was about time.

The ladies involved with the Pre-Raphaelite movement often were (understandably) very frustrated-- Victorian England wasn't an easy place for a woman, especially if she had any artistic or "bohemian" leanings. Maybe that's why I started drawing the Pre-Raph cartoons, to have fun with everyone (male and female) trying to get out of their stodgy restrictions.What would happen if they talked with one another in a 21st Century way?



I always like to tell the story of how I drew the following cartoon during a blackout during this past summer... by candlelight. How goth.

I had read that Lizzie Siddal and Georgie Burne-Jones had wanted to collaborate on a book of fairy tales and this tragically never happened due to Lizzie's death. However, I wished it had happened as it might have begun a true Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood, in which the Pre-Raphaelite women collaborated with each other on projects not unlike what their husbands, brothers and lovers were doing in the PRB.

In recent years there has been a surge of women creators in the comic book industry (as well as best-selling female characters) but it wasn't too long ago when a woman in comics would hear the frequent phrase, "Chick books don't sell." And that was the basis for this cartoon. (Plus my friend Stefan wanted to see Christina Rossetti as Gabriel's moody "goth" sister.)

(In reality, however, Rossetti was actually very supportive of female artists--maybe a little too supportive. His mentor, Ford Madox Brown, actively taught female students who were otherwise shunned by the male-dominated art academies.)

Not Ford Madox Brown giving a lesson to a student, but dastardly Charles Augustus Howell
and his talented mistress who painted forgeries. It happened, but not quite this way.

But I'm having so much fun doing these cartoons that I have recently begun to transfer them from my sketchbooks onto good paper, clean them up and ink them ("inking" for me involves Pigma pens and acrylic gouache) so that they might hopefully be compiled into a book. It's a slow process (and one of several projects I have going), but in the mean time I'm still drawing new cartoons in my sketchbook during my lunchbreaks to post online.

I'm especially thankful to the friends who encouraged me to show these sketches and for all the new friends I've met because of them.

And thank you, Pre-Raphs, for just being you.

Pre-Raphernalia

     I honestly don't know why I started drawing  Pre-Raphaelite cartoons...

A cartoon of William Morris and Edward
Burne-Jones, from my sketchbook.

...only it seemed like a fun thing to do at the time, considering that I was reading about them on my lunchbreaks in the bookstore where I work. But I've had a pretty long fascination with these men and women....



Topsy and Ned "inked" with acrylic gouache.

 

 

It's no secret to anyone who knows me that I love the Pre-Raphaelites. I was always drawn to the romance and color and beauty of this period of 19th Century art. Here I could find  depictions of myths and chivalry... or just paintings entirely devoted to a single ethereal woman in what looked to me like fairy tale garb.

Having worked at various bookstores over an 18 year period, naturally I relished the employee discount which helped lead to the accumulation of these:

My Pre-Raphaelite library.

But wait! There's more!

 

This also includes Pre-Raph-inspired novels as well. And there's still more than this and it
continues to grow as we speak...

Fred Stephens by William Holman Hunt. (1847)
I've had a crush on this painting for
I don't know how long...

So naturally when I had an opportunity to finally go to London, one of my destinations was the Tate Gallery. Unfortunately for me that year, the Tate had chosen to undergo renovations and the Pre-Raphaelite exhibit was on loan or on tour. There was a lot of construction work and what seemed like endless rooms of Turner. No offense to Turner, who I do like, but he was not who I'd come to see.

Millais' "Ophelia" wasn't there, there was no

Rossetti or Burne-Jones or Holman Hunt...

And possibly worst of all--

There was no painting of FRED!!

But thank God they left this one for me to see...



The Lady of Shalott (1888), by JW Waterhouse.

I've had a framed print of this on the wall of my apartment for years, so naturally I always thought this painting was considerably smaller. My friend Donna Dietrich took a picture of me standing next to it  

and you can see how big it actually is. (For the record, I'm on the short side...)

Seeing this magnificent painting helped make up for the disappointment I felt for not being able to see the other Pre-Raphaelite paintings I had only seen in my books. So I bought a "Lady of Shalott" fridge magnet, looked at a lot of Turner and moved on.

Thank goodness for the Victoria and Albert Museum.

We visited the V&A the day before we had to fly back to Philadelphia. And it was here I finally came face-to-canvas with one of my heroes, Edward Burne-Jones, for the very first time.



Sir Edward Burne-Jones standing infront of the world's
 largest gouache painting, "The Star of Bethlehem".
(This particular painting is in Birmingham
 and hopefully someday I'll get to see it...)

First off, I want to mention that I'd been having some artist's block before the vacation. I was still struggling to teach myself how to paint in gouache and I had a painting of a mermaid at home on my drawing table that I was convinced was the worst thing I had ever done. I had brought my sketchbook with me to London, but despite seeing a wealth of things to draw and having plenty of time to draw them, I only did a halfhearted sketch of Trafalgar Square and some pigeons and then never drew another thing on the trip.

                          

At the V&A, I encountered the biggest watercolor/gouache paintings I had ever seen, which I at first mistook for oils. (Unfortunately for poor Ned Burne-Jones, someone trying to clean one of his paintings in Paris made the same mistake and wiped away a year's worth of work.)



But here was someone painting on very large scale with a medium that I was becoming very fond of. But it got better... in a glass case in one of the rooms was...

The Sketchbook.

Ned Burne-Jones' sketchbook, to be precise, opened to some random pages. I stared at it in fascination because it was very loose, very unpolished, playful and serious at the same time. I think I loved it for its imperfection. It wasn't as intimidating as those huge, beautiful gouache paintings of his. It was the shot of inspiration I was looking for.
 

When I finally went back home to my mermaid painting, I decided it wasn't really so bad after all.    


Winged Mermaid, 1998. Gouache with chalk
and colored pencils.

Something else I've always done (privately), was draw cartoons. Maybe my childhood years of reading Mad Magazine and the movie parodies rubbed off on me. As a little girl, I drew my OWN versions of movies or tv shows I had seen.

All this was before I properly discovered comic books... but that's another story.

But one thing led to another through the years and I began to like storytelling with word balloons. And sometimes the sillier the better.



Topsy and Ned compare sketches,
from my sketchbook.

Fred Stephens, the only male "stunner",
also another sketchbook cartoon.

So it was to my delight when I discovered the Pre-Raphaelites themselves drew cartoons of themselves and each other. Here are only some:

                                                        Dante Gabriel Rossetti


A young Millais and (beardless) Hunt express their opinion of  the Royal Academy's taste in art.







Jane Morris and Rossetti's pet wombat named

 Top after Jane's husband, William Morris.



Rossetti mourning the death of Top the Wombat.



Gabriel's sister, Christina Rossetti, responding unfavorably to a review of her poetry.



                                                  

                                                          

                                                     John Everett Millais

An overly windy day in Scotland with a bemused Scotsman fishing in the background.

Effie Gray, (who was married to famous art critic
John Ruskin at the time) giving Millais a
haircut after he banged himself up in
a swimming accident that day.

Edward Burne Jones

The artist has found some extra enthusiasm for working.

Ned nods off while Morris recites one of his epic poems.

Burne-Jones did quite a number of silly cartoons of his friend William Morris.



One of the many cartoons in the series
"Morris Gets Plastered."



Morris goes to Iceland--as Ned imagines it.

Coming up next: My own Pre-Raph cartoons and how Grace Nuth exposed them to EVERYONE. (Ahhhhhhh!!!!!)

More From the Watercolor Years... and The Painting That Blew Away.

Have you ever had a painting blow away? I mean, have a gust of wind actually take it and send it sailing off to Oz or wherever, never to be seen again?

          I didn't think so. That kind of thing only happens to me.

Story, 1995. Watercolor, chalk and colored pencils.

See the shafts of light in the background?
Cheap trick No. 1:
Rub in some blackboard chalk



In my last post, I talked about finding an alternative to watercolor that was opaque and allowed me to paint a lot more thickly than I ever could with watercolors. But before gouache became my medium of choice, I kept experimenting with watercolor, coming up with some (admittedly) cheap tricks.

However, right before I switched from watercolor to gouache permanently, I did a few more watercolor pictures that I was actually happy with. Imagine that! 

Weird.


Sister Moon, 1995. Watercolor, colored pencils.
Cheap trick No. 2: Enhance colors with colored pencils.

I wish I had made the moon a little rounder. 
 Using a circle template would have been a good idea...
But despite my lumpy moon,
I'm still fond of this picture.




There are other pictures I did during this time period that I'd like to do over, using gouache this time... and also with about 15 years more experience to hopefully make them better pictures.

Not to mention that I have fantasy pictures I did in college that I'd like to try again, too!

To see how much I've learned over the years, it's fun to try doing an old picture over again. Even ones I've been thoroughly disgusted with...

But so far, the ones featured in this post I did only once and I think they have stood the test of time for me. Or maybe I'm just sentimental about them. I still like them and don't want to re-do them, even if some of them are M.I.A., as you'll soon read...

My Iguana Got Really Big, 1995. Watercolor.  A true story.

My brother gave me a pet iguana as a joke for Christmas and
it ended up growing about five feet long (tail included.)
When I moved to Arizona, the iguana went back to live
with my brother. "Your turn, now," I told him.


I started experimenting with watercolors mixed with pastels and colored pencils. To make textures I used sea sponges and old toothbrushes (you load an old toothbrush up with paint and flick it with your thumb to make everything from tree bark to ocean spray to "sparkle" effects. Can be messy, but damn, it's fun. )

Green Man, 1996. Watercolor.
With sponge-dabbing and toothbrush-flicking special effects.






And there's blackboard chalk. Who knew it would be so useful for making "mist" effects without an airbrush and the need for a ventilator mask? With watercolor (or gouache) you just rub some cheap drugstore chalk --yes, the kind kids use to draw on sidewalks-- over a painted area, and it sort of diffuses the scene with a mist. (Plus you can erase what you don't like.) Then you go back in with paint and lightly bring out details.



                   
 It's what I used to make the ghost in this picture look transparent:  



Ghost, 1997. Watercolor and blackboard chalk.
Another example of Cheap trick No. 1.





A way to enhance watercolor pictures that have been ...um, just a little bit overworked is to use colored pencils to help bring  back some of the color. If a picture becomes muddy, you (and I mean ME, of course) can help fix mistakes caused by your complete ineptitude with the medium by the gentle application of Prismacolors.

Lightly use the colored pencils (think of a "glaze") over the trouble-areas and this can help restore some of the lost color.  You can even go over the colored pencil with paint again.

"Wait!" I hear you purists yell. "But that's CHEATING!"

To which I respond (rather rudely): "Well, it's MY painting and I can do what I damn well want!"

Um, sorry... Just having frustrated college flashbacks. The colored pencil technique did seem to work well with the painting below but I didn't have long to enjoy my success due to a freakish gust of wind:

Merman, 1997. Watercolor, colored pencils.
The painting that blew away.

True story: Not long after I had finished this picture, I was outside photographing my artwork with my old-fashioned 35mm camera. I was leaning the pictures against my car to take photos of them. My car was parked on the street.

You can see where this is going.

Luckily, the street I lived on had next-to-no-traffic and I went on merrily taking pictures until a sudden gust of wind from nowhere whisked up all my pictures and sent them hurtling down the street.

It was probably high comedy for anyone watching me chase them and of course this was the day someone decided to drive a car down my street as well. Waving frantically at the driver (who I'm sure thought I was a complete lunatic) I gathered up all my paintings safely. Or so I thought.

The "Merman" was the only one I never found...as hard as I searched for it afterwards. Thankfully I

had snapped one--ONE!-- photograph of it before it blew off to Munchkinland or wherever it went, and that's what you see above.

Hopefully, if anyone ever found it they at least had the decency to keep it. I DO want to see my pictures go to good homes, after all...

Gouache and Pez Dispensers

Gouache. So, what is this stuff? It has a funny name, pronounced "gwash." Today I'll talk about how this very old medium became my Very Favorite Paint in The Whole World.

Unicorn, 1997. Gouache. Yes, trying some new stuff. Read on...



When I had become a little more comfortable with watercolors, some people I worked with  commissioned me to do an unusual group of pictures for them. These people happened to collect Pez dispensers. As proper Pez aficionados they traveled the country to Pez conventions to seek out all manner of Pez paraphernalia.

 

King Ghidorah vs. Mothra, 2005.
Gouache.
Because I'm a geek.





Who am I to judge, someone who, along with a gazillion books about the Pre-Raphaelites, also seemed to collect a vast amount of Godzilla toys?

My assignment (if I should accept it) was to paint several pictures of Pez dispensers that would be made into posters and postcards and sold as Pez Fan Art (yes, there is such a thing) at conventions.



Well, money is a great motivating factor for a would-be illustrator no matter how bizarre the subject matter, so the next thing I knew I was painting my first Pez dispenser in watercolor.

I like to paint and draw fantasy scenes above all else, and this is what my clients wanted: Pez dispensers in landscapes or with funky backgrounds. Okay. So far, so weird. After they saw and liked the first one I did, they gave me this one to paint:

A Pez dispenser with a hand holding an eyeball, made sometime in the sixties. Apparently very sought after.

Yup, I was the woman for the job.

They wanted it to have a psychedelic background like in a Peter Max painting. Bright colors. And nope, watercolor would not do this weirdness justice.

What to do? What to use? Oh wait, I still have that box of stuff left over from college that I never knew what to do with. What was it called again...?





The stuff left over from college.



When I started at Pratt, I had been given a list of art supplies I'd need for class. A lot of it I used and a lot I never used at all. This stuff fell into into the latter category.

Gouache. Sometimes known as bodycolor. Incorrectly called poster paint. Still, I thought, it'll give me nice flat, opaque colors for a poster, right?

                               So I began the picture and this was the result:

I know, not up there with Edward Burne-Jones' "Star of Bethlehem", but it was a start.

But I was astonished by this "new" paint I discovered.

I found:
1) It blends like a dream.

2) It dries to a velvetty matte finish.

3) You can use it thick as oil or acrylic--or as transparently as watercolor.

4) It works and plays well with other media. I was to eventually use it with colored pencils, pastels, chalk, as well as regular watercolors. You can even make it "permanent" and waterproof  by adding a few drops of acrylic medium.


I tried it on the next couple Pez pictures, using it like I would my watercolors.



Don't laugh! This was serious artistic experimentation going on here.

Gouache has been around for a very long time. It was used as early as 14th Century Europe and takes its name from the Italian, "guazzo." Art historians prefer to call it bodycolor. What makes it thicker than watercolor is the addition of gum arabic and also chalk. (Hmm, I was

already mixing up blackboard chalk and watercolor, but that's another story...)

I started using gouache in my fantasy paintings, trying it on these two first:

Pumpkins, 1997. Bodycolor. Oh, all right, just gouache...

And...



Hopi Kachina Dancer, 1997. Done for my sister who had just moved to Arizona.
(I was still in New Jersey at the time...)





I soon realized that I loved using this stuff and it's odd when I hear people say it's hard to use. I don't find that's the case, because for me, it's a perfect fit. Best of all, I also don't feel like I'm wasting paint when I use it because when it dries on the palette, just add water and you've got wet paint again. You can't do that with oil or acrylic.



Rainforest Dragon, 1997. Gouache.

 Anyway, this is how painting a psychedelic Pez dispenser actually helped me find my medium of choice.  Here's some more from 1997, the year I finally used That Stuff I Had From College (and so glad I still had it.) :


Kirins, 1997. More of That Stuff.



1997 was apparently good year for painting creatures... Well, what year isn't?