Seasons of John Hurt

My earliest memory of John Hurt was actually of his voice, as the heroic rabbit Hazel in the animated version of one of my favorite books, Watership Down. Next came The Elephant Man, Jim Henson's The Storyteller and of course, Alien. However, my mother (who was born on the exact same day as Sir John— 22 January 1940) is very partial to his infamous scene in Spaceballs, which is her favorite Hurt performance.

Isn't little Captain Grumpy and 
his Gallifrey-destroying
superweapon cute? 

        

(This is a somewhat long post, so please bear with me.)    

    In 2014, I was still working on my sketchbook drawings of each incarnation of the Doctor in order. Each sketch (which would eventually become a finished illustration) had a little fob-watch in the corner to indicate each Doctor's "number." So what "time" on the clock should the War Doctor have? 

    This was a little bit of a quandary  because he was the hidden incarnation between the Eighth and Ninth Doctors. I decided his designation would be 8:30— half past eight.

    When I finished my sketch of War as he appeared in "Day of the Doctor," I celebrated by getting a little War Doctor action figure.    

    Around the same time, my friend Sandra Franklin had attended a talk that John Hurt gave in her hometown of Norwich, Norfolk, and she surprised me by showing him a copy of my sketch of the War Doctor.  She had asked if he could sign it for me!              

    He then asked her if she had another copy of it for him to keep—and luckily, she did! She told him that I was drawing all the Doctors in order, and so he wrote,

    "For Raine. All best wishes. Keep going!" 

    You can imagine how absolutely over the moon I was by this. Thanks must be given again to my dear friend Sandra. And to John Hurt (the legend!) himself for the encouragement.

    Needless to say, I kept going. 

Here's the very messy beginnings of the sketchbook drawing. You can see that I'm all over
the place in my book. On the opposite page, you can see my scribbled notes and
my trying to work out the position of his hands. 

Beginning rough stages: I made a large photocopy of the working sketch and traced it 
onto some vellum bristol paper. I also tidied up the fob-watch in the corner. 

        

And starting my first layers of acrylic gouache. There would just be a touch of subtle
color with the red of his sonic screwdriver and his brown eyes.

And the finished version!

Next up, I had wanted to do a Young War Doctor as he had appeared very briefly at the end of "Night of the Doctor".

    The image of young John Hurt that has been used in that short episode, which had finally shown the Eighth Doctor's regenerating, had been from a production of Crime and Punishment, which I had watched on YouTube.

    I had then made some reference drawings in my sketchbook as I watched the program. 

    I had decided that Young War needed to dramatically hold some sort of prop. At first. I toyed with the idea of his holding a gun (very un-Doctor-like, but probably more in line with the un-Doctorly War Doctor).

    Eventually, I had settled on his taking a trophy: an eyestalk from one of his archenemies, the Daleks.

    Little did I know synchronicity was at work because at the same time the iconic image of the young War Doctor holding a Dalek eyestalk was being used in the superb charity short film  Seasons of War. 

    (You can watch it here!)

    The eyestalk in this case had been used as a telescope, which I thought was an absolutely genius idea. It was the concept of director/writer Andy Robinson and writer Declan May.

The transferred sketch, with some tidying up of the fob-watch. War looks very grumpy,
like he wants to hit someone over the head with that Dalek eyestalk. 

Most of the painting done here; I decided I wanted to put some splatter on the
fob-watch in the corner to show that Young War gets down and
dirty with his business. 

The finished version, which the same small hints of color and
added splatter on the fob-watch. 

    I was contacted by some of the filmmakers about the happy coincidence of the Dalek eyestalk—and I ended making some new friends!

    Seasons of War became an excellent, limited run charity book full of brilliant stories and art, published by Chinbeard Books  and edited by Declan May for Cauldwell Children, all telling unknown tales of this previously secret incarnation of the Doctor. 

    I had ordered a copy right away. When I had received it and saw what a beautiful book it was, I had wished I had been able to contribute to it in some way. It had received many amazing reviews and there was even one in Doctor Who Magazine.

                       There would eventually be another printing of it...


    While the second edition (with added, all-new content: brand new stories, art and commentary) was being readied, something very sad occurred: we lost John Hurt, only a week after his 77th birthday.   

    This came as a great shock to me. I had been at my job at the bookstore when my co-worker gave me the news and I had to leave the sales floor to process it. 

    That evening, I was contacted by the publisher of Chinbeard Books, Barnaby Eaton-Jones, who had seen my two finished War Doctor illustrations. He told me that there would be a special new tribute to John Hurt included with this latest and perhaps last edition of Seasons of War—and he asked if my two illustrations could be included in it.

    I immediately said YES (of course!!) — and I was honored to finally be able to contribute in some way to this wonderful book. 

    When I received my copy of Seasons of War, I was nervous about seeing my illustrations in print. Would they fit in there with all the beautiful content I had seen in the previous edition?

Here are some photos (below) of my contributions. My two War Doctor illustrations sort of "bookend" a touching new tribute to John Hurt written by editor Declan May. 

 

    The book is absolutely gorgeously put together, and like the first version:  hefty! Which is great because there's so much more brilliant content in this next edition, a whole missing Doctor Who era starring John Hurt at different ages. So many fantastic stories, commentary and beautiful illustrations.

 

    Everyone involved did a wonderful job and all the love shows. And I want to thank the publishers once more for letting me be a part of it.

    All proceeds went to support Caudwell Children.

    Next, I was commissioned by Declan May to do a alternate cover for yet another (and last) reprint of the book.

    In 2017, North America had a solar eclipse. During this, I was working at a bookstore and trying to come up with an idea for the new illustration. 

    I had been drawing little doodles of War standing in front of an eclipse on post-it notes at work (don't laugh, that's how these things always start) and I finally settled on this idea and began scribbling in my sketchbook. 

    I had wanted some cosmic event in the sky as a good, dramatic backdrop for the War Doctor, and this is where the very timely eclipse came in. My thinking was that there might be symbolism in darkness temporarily covering a sun, showing his despair at having to make a terrible choice. 

   
    My sister Victoria told me that I didn't have any pictures of me actually at my easel or at my drawing table, and that people might want to see how I work. So here I am!

Also, on the easel, you'll notice the 12th Doctor's sonic screwdriver. No, it doesn't help me draw, but I used it to see the position of the War Doctor's hand while holding his own sonic.

(Oh, who am I kidding?  It's a seriously awesome sonic screwdriver and it's just fun to play with it because it lights up three different ways and makes cool noises.) 

    There's been a few photos of my hand holding my pencil or paintbrush, but it's hard to get a photo of yourself working when you live alone and your laptop's self-timer produces some dreadful photos. (Also, my dog and cats had no thumbs to operate a digital camera.)

    Luckily, Victoria happened to be visiting my (then) new apartment to help me put some drapes up over my many bookcases (it helps keep the dust off them and makes the room look less chaotic)—and she snapped a few pictures of me drawing.

    In the above picture, I'm making adjustments. It's easier to see your composition when it's vertical (on the easel) because you're able to step back and look at it from a distance. Before I had the easel, I used to just tape the work-in-progress to a wall in order to look at it.

The finished Seasons of War limited edition cover.

    What were your favorite John Hurt performances? Did you enjoy his fantastic Big Finish audios? (There's also a brand new series of Young War Doctor adventures as well, starring Jonathon Carley, which I'm eager to listen to.)  

    And once again, I would like to thank John Hurt for his inspiration.

                                                                    I kept going.

 

Charity Illustrations

Would you look at the size of that one, Doctor?

A few years ago, I had been asked by Christopher Samuel Stone if I would like to contribute some illustrations to a Doctor Who charity project that he was working on. He needed a few illustrations based on classic Who episodes, which also included the 1996 TV Movie. Here are the ones that I did. (Though sadly under-represented in my resulting batch here, are the Fifth and Sixth Doctor eras.)

All of these illustrations are vignettes in box frames. They're all done in my usual medium of acrylic gouache and ink, after which I scan them into Photoshop for clean-up and enhancement. They were a lot of fun to do, and they make me want to do more illustrations based on old episodes. (Hmmm. The wheels are turning...)

Planet of the Spiders

"Planet of the Spiders" was the last episode of Jon Pertwee's run on Doctor Who. The Third Doctor would eventually die of an overdose of radiation while on Metebelis 3 (the eponymous planet) and regenerate into Tom Baker's Fourth Doctor.

The challenge in this one was trying to make Jon Pertwee recognizable as seen from the back. I also wanted to make the Great One look more like a real spider, so I looked at a lot of spider reference. Fortunately, I'm not too arachnophobic.

...But then again, I don't live on Metebelis 3. Or Australia, for that matter. 

The Great One, a giant spider craving absolute power, wants the Metebelis crystal which the Doctor is holding. Needless to say, she does not succeed in getting it.

I usually tape the photocopied rough sketch next to the painting on the easel so I can consult it while I'm working.

I later added "sparkles" to the background of the picture, to represent more crystals in the spider's lair.

Also, I couldn't resist adding just a little bit of color for the blue Metebelis crystal.

The Second Doctor Running

The concept for this illustration was just to show "the Doctor running." It could be any incarnation, so I picked one of my favorites: Patrick Troughton.

"When I say run...RUN!"

This was inspired by Troughton's famous running scene in the serial “The Invasion,” in which he comically flees rampaging Cybermen.

I transfer my sketches onto vellum-surface bristol paper using a lightbox. I sometimes start by inking the drawing using waterproof  brush-pens; or even dark Prismacolor to trace over the pencil work. I then paint over that with acrylic gouache, working with inexpensive watercolor brushes. 

Trying to capture the scribbly energy of  my preliminary sketches can be difficult when I'm doing the finished illustration. It usually never works. I have to choose one outline as opposed to many. 

Because I couldn't find a good reference shot of the Second Doctor's shoes, I remember having to research Hush Puppies, the brand of shoes Troughton favored—specifically a pair from the mid-1960s! 

There's no color in this one at all. These days, I do like to keep color to a minimum, and usually just for highlights. Sometimes for atmospheric effects, I'll add some colored pencil or chalk to the mix. The paintings start very loose until I gradually sharpen up the line work.
                                                                      Leela

Here's Louise Jameson's fierce and cool Leela, the second of the Fourth Doctor's companions. As with the previous pictures in this batch, I chose to put the character slightly outside the frame. My idea was that the box-like frames look a bit like comic book panels. 

The jungle background here is meant to be reminiscent of the serial that introduced Leela, "The Face of Evil".

These episodes are especially notable for some brilliant dialogue by writer Chris Boucher which remains uncannily relevant even today:

"The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common - they don't change their views to fit the facts. They change the facts to fit their views, which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs changing."

Once again, here's the working sketch next to the painting's progress. I go back and forth from drawing table to easel, depending on how the picture is looking. Sometimes you need to look at your work in a vertical position, standing back from it to see what needs adjusting. 

The Zarbi

Here's the First Doctor and a very early adventure. I've actually done a couple of pictures of the Web Planet, (also known as Vortis) and its various insectoid creatures. The challenge here was to try to make the Zarbi look less like people in costumes, and more like actual insects—so it was back to looking at bug reference again.  

I remember that I was working on this on New Year's Day, 2017, and I'd felt a pain in my right side while sitting at the easel. Thinking it was appendicitis, I ended up going to the emergency room that night. It would prove to be nothing serious but that had been my anxious first day of the new year as I was painting the First Doctor.

"You Zarbi are a real pain in the side, you know? Hmm?" 

Victoria and the Ice Warrior

The brief for this illustration was just "Ice Warrior" but I wanted to feature the Second Doctor's companion Victoria Waterfield as well. At that time, I hadn't done any pictures of her yet.

"EeeeeeeaaaaAAAAAAAHHH!!!!"

Victoria is a displaced Victorian woman and here is being threatened by Varga, the Martian warrior. Either that or he thinks she looks cold and just wants to offer her a nice mug of  hot cocoa.

I've joked that I should use this illustration as a Christmas card. 

I think Victoria's superpower was her ear-splitting scream. If I was that Ice Warrior, I would have covered my ears and hightailed it back to the ship.
"No cocoa for you then!"

Ace and Karra

Most of the things that blew up in the Seventh Doctor's era were probably because of companion Ace McShane and her Nitro-9. Ace, played by Sophie Aldred, became an iconic companion for many people.

In the last episodes of the classic series, she encountered the deadly Cheetah People and most notably, the fierce Kara, played by Lisa Bowerman. Kara had tried to convince Ace to follow her wildest instincts and become a Cheetah as well. 

The background in this picture is the volcanic, dying Cheetah Planet.

Once again, I wanted to make Kara look a bit more like a real cheetah and tried to give her more menacing claws.


Later on, I couldn't resist coloring Ace's eyes in yellow to show the beginning of her own transformation into a Cheetah Person.







Eighth Doctor TV Movie     
(The Enemy Within)
 

The last two illustrations in this batch were both from the Paul McGann TV Movie, sometimes known as The Enemy Within. (Of course I saved the Eighth Doctor 'til last.)

In this first picture, the newly regenerated and very confused Doctor is trying to figure out "WHO... AM...I?" and he's looking for something to wear besides a morgue sheet.

.

I admit to being very fond of the 8th Doctor, as he was everyone's continuing lifeline to Doctor Who in the so-called "Wilderness Years" when Doctor Who was not on television. Instead, there were comics, novels and many, many Big Finish audios before Russell T. Davies officially rebooted the show

This is the scene right after his somewhat terrifying regeneration from Sylvester McCoy's Seventh Doctor (still to me the scariest regeneration, with Patrick Troughton's spinning around in a void, shouting "No, no, no, no, no, no!" coming in at second.)

He's kicked the door of the morgue down with regeneration energy (I presume.)

My "Fob-Watch" Eighth
Doctor illustration. 

For almost a decade afterward, the Eighth Doctor kept the banner flying for Doctor Who in other media. And he's also one of my favorite Doctors because of that, I think.

In my opinion, he had the coolest TARDIS—all Jules Verne-steampunk and Lord Byron-gothic, full of books, statues and candelabra—and an observation ceiling above giant iron arches which opened to the vastness of space. So when I did my first version of Eight for my Fob-Watch Doctor series, I needed to get this TARDIS interior in the picture as well.

And last but not least, here's a somewhat more goofy illustration of Eight and brief companion Grace Holloway on a stolen police motorcycle racing through San Francisco on New Year's Eve, 1999.

I'm of a certain age when I remember everyone thinking the year 1999 would be so futuristic because it was the turn of the millennium. Instead, it was rather... meh.

I remember watching the TV Movie the first time that it aired on network television in the States. Plot-wise, it was a bit bonkers, but I still have fond feelings for it. 

However, we all had to wait until 2013 to finally see the Eighth Doctor regenerate into his next incarnation...


                          
...Who would become the War Doctor, played by John Hurt...

                         
                                       ...Who will be the subject of my next post.                              

                        See you then!

Venusian Aikido

 
It's taken me years to turn this goofy sketchbook drawing into a finished illustration.

This was a sketch that I had done way back in 2014. (Has it really been seven years?) It spanned across two pages of my sketchbook. I had always meant to ink and paint it at some future time, and it took the chaos of 2020 and 2021 for me to finally get back to it. I desperately needed something ridiculous to work out my frustration on, and what better way than to have the Third Doctor kicking some Sea Devil butt? (Although I feel sorry for the poor turtle-faces.)

Jon Pertwee's Third Doctor was my first Doctor. I had encountered Doctor Who at the age of nine at my grandmother's house in southern New Jersey when our local PBS station had begun showing episodes in the afternoons. It had been the early 1970s. 

Pertwee's Doctor was more physical than his predecessors, and he had practiced a martial arts form that he called Venusian Aikido. "The Sea Devils" was the episode that introduced these titular reptilian antagonists.

    

This particular martial arts move that I gave the Doctor isn't really aikido, but rather a taekwondo roundhouse kick. Let's just say that the Doctor is quite spry for his age. 


The year's news had been relentless and my anxiety had been ramped up to eleven. I wanted something lighter, even a little goofy, to work on—because I'd been feeling too much like this poor Sea Devil in the right hand corner of this sketch, whom I've affectionately named Fred. 

I photocopied the drawing from my sketchbook in order to transfer it onto vellum bristol paper, which is my favorite paper because it takes a variety of media, everything from gouache, colored pencils, pastels and ink.

The photocopy ended up several sizes bigger than I usually work and I've since forgotten why I decided to make it so big. At any rate, I traced it using my lightbox, adjusted it a bit in pencil and...

...promptly put it aside for another couple of months to work on other projects. Again, my choice to work larger made finishing it take a bit longer. 

At this stage, it still had a long way to go. I had decided that the Third Doctor's coat needed a color, which I decided would be maroon. Once I decided that the illustration was physically finished, I photographed it so I could do my usual "clean-up" in Photoshop.  

At the time I was working on this picture, I had also taken the big step of finally ordering a Wacom tablet to better help my Photoshop enhancements. I've been using a mouse (agonizingly) all this time and I thought it was time to get better tools. Of course, I will have to play with it a lot more to get a feel for it. But I prefer working traditionally. It's therapeutic for me and I enjoy using inks, pencils and paint on paper. I use the Wacom mainly for strengthening linework from the photo scans, and for some special effects. 

Poor Fred the Sea Devil is so done with
everything right now. 

                                                 Coming up next:
                        An assortment of Doctor Who charity illustrations. 

All the Young D'Oods

 
Let me explain.

My friend Sandra Franklin is obsessed with Oods. She loves them. So the following sketches were made for her a few years ago. I still need to properly finish them, but I also kind of like them just as sketches. 
   
For those unfamiliar with these tentacled Doctor Who aliens, here's a handy primer.  

   

   
I had shared this sketchbook drawing of a dapper Ood painter  a few years back on my Pre-Raphernalia blog. (Yes, I apologize, I haven't gotten back to Pre-Raphernalia for  awhile, either.)

And yes, that is a Judoon wearing a cravat in in the painting on the floor.

Proserpine
(the red-haired version)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti

   
   

Because we're both fans of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, here we have a Pre-Raphaelite Brother Ood. (Get it?)

He is working on a version of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's famous painting of Proserpine holding a pomegranate. Here, the 10th Doctor holds an Adipose. (Well, it's roundish and about the same size as a pomegranate.)

            

   

    

Since my friend Sandra and I are also Edgar Allan Poe fans as well (I've been known to draw few Poe cartoons here and there…) it was inevitable that I would be drawing an Edgar Allan Ood.
 
The "bust of Pallas" from the poem "The Raven" is a Time Lady, of course. And  there aren't one but two "Tell-Tale Hearts."

The  puns would continue...

       

Sandra also got a chance to show former Doctor Who showrunner Russell T. Davies the Edgar Allan Ood drawing. 

He sees the Ood. 

He has seen the Ood. 

    The idea for this particular goofiness came about when Sandra and I were talking about how the 12th Doctor needed a band. The idea here was for it to resemble a Robert Palmer video, except with Oods. (And yes, I did try to work in a drummer, but found I sadly didn't have room.)

    Below, is the inked and painted version of this illustration.  

I can't promise this will be the end of the puns, or the Oods, but we shall see!


Coming up next: 
Some Venusian Aikido. Hai!