Tag: Christopher Seaman

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RESEARCHING ‘MANNA’ PART 4: “But is it a Mark 3 or a Mark 4?”

How it sometimes looks when you are researching a subject for a piece of historic fiction you want to write...

INTRODUCTION

To say a tank is just a tank when working on a book such as MANNA is to armchair generals like being asked what shade of white you want when going to a paint shop. I am just as bad as any armchair general when some of this comes up. How many Hollywood war movies made over the years featured generic or historically incorrect vehicles? (I can imagine a lot of mumbling at this point.) Of course, there were good fiscal reasons in a number of cases for this- getting the equipment beyond what was in storage on the backlot was too expensive, or building replicas was too expensive, and so on. No doubt some directors and producers probably made comments like “It’s just a tank. Who cares if it’s American and we painted it up to look German? Nobody will know- or care.”

These days, however, that just isn’t on. We do care. Why wasn’t there more debris on the beach in DUNKIRK? Why was a Yorktown class aircraft carrier subbed in for a shot In MIDWAY where the LEXINGTON is shown to be sinking at the end of the Battle of the Coral Sea? Where were the Wildcats in MIDWAY? Why was the bow of the EXETER, as shown in WORLD ON FIRE not given the straight stem it had in real life? Why is a U-Boat of the First World War drawn like on from the Second in a comic book I read recently?

We care. The materials are out there. People still know these things. Why didn’t that information get into the hands of people making these otherwise excellent films and stories? You can actually gain some insight on how this dogs people working in the historic genre from watching an interview with Anthony Horowitz about the making of FOYLE’S WAR and the challenges they faced in ‘getting it right’. I found it enlightening and intimidating at the same time, making me realise that working on historic fiction is a lot like juggling a lot of balls in the air. If you are interested in writing about the war, look up this interview and watch it- if you can find it.

Enthusiasts are well informed and very picky. Computer animation has made recreating the terrible vistas of war much easier. Video games and 3D simulations like BBC’s incredible “BERLIN BLITZ,” (created using the Oculus Rift), can put viewers into the action on an almost visceral level. (I could go on about how disturbing it is that many players seem to derive more fun than horror from these experiences, but let’s leave that for another time. “BERLIN BLITZ” left me in a cold sweat, unable to speak for some time after experiencing it. Others left saying how exciting it was. Hmmm…)

GETTING THE TOOLS TO DO THE JOB

So, facing this, I want to get a number of details in MANNA right and leave any construction of the imagination to things which are not out of the realm of possibility, but are also not crucial to driving the history in the plot of the book.

Getting information on vehicles, aircraft and weapons isn’t that hard. It’s only time consuming and requires fact checking- especially if initial sources are sites on the internet created by enthusiasts not necessarily affiliated with museums, collections or organizations that specialize in keeping or operating the guns, planes or tanks in question. Books are better for that, although, they are not fool-proof. As time passes and some younger authors are writing these works, I find errors are creeping in where once they didn’t. It may be that the speed and convenience of the internet is trumping good ol’ fashioned scholarly research.

Better scholarship is found more these days in books where the author has direct access to archival materials and related primary sources. If possible, meet these people and talk to them. Go to the museums. Visit the archives. Explain the project and ask for help in locating resources. Discuss findings in books with interpreters at these places. I will give you three examples of how this can be useful.

  1. I wanted information on pilots who evaded capture by the Germans in World War Two and returned to Britain. What happened to them? Were they able to go back into action with their old units? If they’d been helped in their escape by a Resistance cell, how did that impact on their chances of returning to operations in Europe? The National Air Force Museum of Canada in Trenton was very helpful in pointing out resources and either supporting or refuting evidence I had discovered in other places. One meeting was all it took.
  2. How does one start the engines on a Lancaster bomber? That depends on the type of Lancaster it is. Was it built in Britain or Canada? Is it a Mark I, III, or X? Does it have Rolls Royce Merlin or Packard Merlin engines? Was it built near the end of the war with possible deployment to the far east for missions against Japan in mind? All of this matters, as I discovered when I asked someone at the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum in Mount Hope, outside Hamilton, ON., this very question.
  3. If gasoline was rationed, how did people get about in occupied Europe during the war? Welcome to the wonderful world of wood or coal gas powered vehicles, carts pulled by dogs in harness, known in the Netherlands as Honderkar, and horses pulling wagons for the Wehrmacht. (On the last point, I discovered the German army was not nearly as mechanized as one would have believed from watching the propaganda movies. Hundreds of thousands of horses were used by the army in the war. One of my interviews with witnesses to the German occupation of the Netherlands revealed that it was rare to see mechanized vehicles under enemy control during the last half of the war beyond Kubelwagens, Schwimmwagens and motorcycles. Trucks were uncommon and then often only moved at night after D-Day.) This will be important as I sort out the conveyances used by one of the characters in the book. She will start with a small car, a van version of the Fiat Topolino, move to a wood gas powered motorcycle rigged up by her husband and finish with a honderkar. Some creative licence may be needed in parts, but only so in parts because everything else has be verified as having existed at that time.

Ask the questions of your sources. You may be surprised by the answers…

LINKING BACK TO OTHER ELEMENTS IN THE STORY

Finally, remember the people who ride the machines are just as important as the machines themselves. Check uniforms. Also, check markings on vehicles and camouflage patterns. If you’re going to portray a Canadian Military Pattern truck from a certain regiment of the Canadian Army in a particular area of fighting, make sure that particular type of machine was there and make sure the markings on the vehicle match units that served in the region at that time.

The only other thing you can do is come up with fictitious markings for a non-existent unit and then you have some latitude in terms of what you can portray in your story. For example, in MANNA, I created a fictional R.A.F bomber squadron flying Lancasters from a fictional place in Lincolnshire. The squadron codes are fictional. The tail markings- highly unusual anyway- are also made up. This was done after careful research allowed me to develop the above with a certain knowledge that none of it existed previously and no one either descended from squardron crews or actually there would come up and tell me I got it all wrong. Frederick E. Smith did this when he wrote 633 SQUADRON and its sequels. You can get the information to do this online or in books. I used both to re-search what I used eventually, coming up with my Lancaster looking something like this-

The serial number is real. The squadron codes and tail markings are made up. This is one of the computer generated models I acquired for use in the book. I modified the original markings to make up TIZZY, but am only using it myself and do not intend to make them available elsewhere. Hopefully, that will keep the original creator happy.

I hope this helps you realize the nature of the work you have ahead of you. When presenting this material in the class on the graphic novel at George Brown College, I have been greeted afterwards by comments like “Well, I guess I won’t be writing any historical graphic novels any time soon,” or “I think I’ll stick to fantasy.” I love the last one the most because I would pay real money to see the reaction of someone like J.K. Rowling or George R.R. Martin to a comment like that. For historic fiction, at least you have a foundation upon which to base your research. I would think fantasy or science fiction would, if anything, be harder to create.

But that is a topic for another time…

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RESEARCHING ‘MANNA’ PART 3: Graphic novels about the war

If you intend to create a graphic novel, study the works of other authors and artists in the medium. When I suggest you study graphic novels, I mean read self-contained works, not trade paperbacks collecting six issues of your favourite superhero story. You can certainly learn things from those works, but they are structured differently from graphic novels, which have more of a traditional narrative structure and do not presume that you have a pre-existing knowledge of the characters or situations. By graphic novels, I mean MAUS, by Art Spiegelman, A SAILOR’S STORY by Sam Glanzman, ERNEST & ETHEL by Ronald Briggs.

Books like that. The ones above are named because they all deal with the Second World War. In the pictures below are a collection of graphic novels I have collected on the war. It is by no means complete. Click on the images to bring up a separate post. Click on that for an enlargement. These books are all available either through major major retailers, or the secondary market.

SOME OBSERVATIONS…

One thing a number of these publications have in common is that they originated in Europe. I met a German representative from a distribution company a few years back who said graphic novels about the war are popular in Europe as the grand-children of the people who lived through it try to understand what happened then. I have found more of these books coming from Europe now than from America or Britain, which seemed to focus more on war narratives a number of years ago. Perhaps it is because the nature of the conflict was such that continental Europe is only now being able to examine the war as it was fought right there and the British, while bombed and terrorized by the Luftwaffe and Hitler’s U-Boats never endured enemy occupation outside the Channel islands and the Americas were largely untouched by enemy action except off the coast at sea. Certainly I’ve learned the experiences of those living on the continent was VERY different to that of my parents, who grew up in the British Isles.

Some stories focus as much on civilians as they do on soldiers. All of them, whether true stories like TWISTS OF FATE, IRMINA, A SAILOR’S STORY, MAUS, THE BATTLE OF ARNHEM- SEPTEMBER 1944, SIX DAYS, ALAN’S WAR and I, RENE TARDI etc., adapted from a novel like SUITE FRANCAISE, or adapted pieces inspired by historic characters or events like the Garth Ennis stories, LE GRAND DUKE, BEAR’S TOOTH, and VOICES IN THE DARK, brings new dimensions to our understanding of the war and jumps beyond the standard US vs THEM stories that were more popular years ago. When I look at anthologies or collected works like ACES HIGH, WAR STORIES, BLAZING COMBAT and BATTLE CLASSICS, I notice that the selections here stand out also for their balance of characterisation and action. ACES HIGH represents a complete run between its covers and thus we get to see some more traditional stories alongside the ones that explore moral issues in war, but I wonder from the selections in the Garth Ennis picks for BATTLE CLASSICS how many other stories not in the anthology appeared in that magazine fitting the more formulaic works that were popular years ago.

(I have one book here, ROSE BLANCHE, which is not a graphic novel, but rather a picture book. The images are so much part of the story, though, that I keep it with the graphic novels just the same.)

Please note in the photos I have two samples of contemporary comic strips from the war in my collection- JOHNNY CANUCK and JANE, the latter being a biography of Norman Pett, the strip’s creator and his model for the title character, Christabel Leighton-Porter. Both are gems: the former for the Canadian content and the latter for the cheekiness that pushed the limits of propriety for its day. I met a veteran of the Canadian Army’s campaign in the Netherlands a few years ago and we got to talking about Jane. He told me waiting for the next installment of strips to come out in the army newspaper was something that helped keep him going during that campaign. JUST JANE, the Lancaster bomber at East Kirkby in England, is named after Pett’s character. If you visit YouTube, you can find old Pathe newsreels of Pett drawing Leighton-Porter for the much anticipated next edition of Jane’s story. It’s a bit of a staging job, though, because more often than not Pett drew his model from the nude and added clothes- or removed them- later in the final panels. Very much of their time, neither character is well-known today outside historical scholarship and the fading memories of people who were there when the adventures of Johnny or Jane first went to print.

THE HOLOCAUST

Before Art Spiegelman created MAUS and brought comics and graphic novels to a whole new readership in the world, the Holocaust also appeared in comics. WE SPOKE OUT: COMIC BOOKS AND THE HOLOCAUST, edited by Neal Adams, Raphael Medoff and Craig Yoe, is a collection of stories from the pages of comic books where the Holocaust figures in the plot. One of the most powerful in it is Neal Adams’ own piece on the wartime experiences of Dina Gottliebová, (later Dina Babbitt). I bought the book so I could get a complete copy of the story and acquired with it a rich legacy of this horrific period in the history of so-called humanity. It provides a good foundation to accounts of the Holocaust in sequential art up to the publication of MAUS, allowing me to put some of the other books I have on the subject- like Joe Kubert’s YOSSEL, Dave Sim’s JUDENHASS, IRENA and AUSCHWITZ into a kind of context. The art in each is unique. The stories are powerful. Put together with the other books I’ve shown in this article and unrelated historical graphic novels I possess that are not covered here, (like George Pratt’s haunting take on the World War One character ENEMY ACE), I have gained an appreciation that artists in the genre have a freedom to be more expressive, abstract or illustrative with the art used to compliment the text here than they do in conventional superhero comics, where other expectations dominate the presentation of the work. Perhaps that is best, for I wonder how some of these stories would ‘read’ visually if they were presented in the same style as so many of those wonderfully action packed and dramatic tales from the big comic companies. WE SPOKE OUT gives us a glimpse of what they could look like, but I wonder if they would have the same impact if rendered exclusively in that style. I think not. I think the variety of art styles presented in all these books is what makes them together so powerful, for it reminds us that the filters we use when telling our stories don’t just stop working with the words we choose to put on the page. The images themselves carry as much of the narrative and need to be given careful consideration in their design and creation.

CONCLUSIONS…

In all graphic novels, there is often a tug of war between writers and artists regarding which part of the book gets prominence. Having met some famous writers and artists, I have heard about this firsthand. One writer said she felt lucky to have such great artists illustrating her stories, but knew not all writers could say the same. “If you can write and draw your story, you’ve got much better control over the content,” she concluded.

I can think you also have much more responsibility too, for a comic panel is not so big when you have to find space for both words and pictures in it. Creating any sequential art, especially one that focuses on strong story telling, is a delicate balancing act and is not for everyone. So, in closing, think carefully about the story you want to tell and the best way to do it. I have a number of friends who would much rather read MANNA as an illustrated novel than a graphic novel. At this point, I’m not entirely sure they’re wrong. What may emerge in the end could be a hybrid like Terry Moore’s STRANGERS IN PARADISE, which uses prose, sequential art, and mixtures of the two to tell its story. Another good example would be Sydney Padua’s THE THRILLING ADVENTURES OF LOVELACE AND BABBAGE.

At the time of writing, I’m thinking the hybrid might be the answer…

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RESEARCHING ‘MANNA’ PART 2: Hearing the voices of the war

As time passes and the Second World War slips from the living memory of humanity, efforts have been made by family members, museums and government organisations to gather the stories of those who lived through the conflict for posterity. Some of these collections have been published for the public as books. Some have been made available as media resources. Peter Jackson used audio recordings of First World War veterans made almost fifty years ago to create the narrative track for his documentary film, THEY SHALL NOT GROW OLD. Similar projects related to the Second World War could be created the same way as thousands of stories have been preserved in various ways for people to consult in the future.

Where MANNA and the occupation of the Netherlands in World War Two is concerned, I have pulled source material from a number of places. First, the internet, using Google and Wikipedia as a starting point, helped to lay a foundation. Wikipedia is, to me, a good resource because of the links reaching out from articles to other websites or books. I have found much useful information that way. Wikipedia is good for the SEARCH part of fact finding. Google and Wikipedia quickly turn into rabbit holes and dogs chasing their tails when searching, though, because websites link to other websites, but the information shared is either the same or a variation therein. If you need a deep dive, you need to look elsewhere.

Books. Lots of books. Books about the subject directly and things spinning off from it will be a good place to start. For me, these were resources I used to get going. OPERATION MANNA/CHOWHOUND was already out of print when I picked it up. A newer book, OPERATION CHOWHOUND, came out jut a couple of years ago. Together, they compliment each other on the food drops that gave my book its inspiration.

  • What I call ‘the Dutch shelf’, where many of the books on the Netherlands related to MANNA are kept. THE HUNGER WINTER is one of the best, with excellent research and good science behind the effects of the mass starvation on the Dutch people affected by it. THE FORGOTTEN BATTLE covers one of the Canadian Army’s tough fights through the Low Countries during the last months of the war. STAR CHILDREN is written as a novel, but is really a docu-drama about the Holocaust in the Netherlands.
  • These are most of the books in the set of personal remembrances of Dutch Canadians who lived through the occupation, written in their own words. Each book is about 100 pages, but it’s well packed with good information that mostly stands up to scrutiny.
  • I write about the details and books like these are full of them. Ridder’s book is part national history, part documentary about the war and throughout both is the story of his life growing up at this devastating time in the Netherlands. THE HOME FRONT and the Southampton book also feature personal accounts, but the former is largely a collection of passbooks, guides, badges, toys and ephemera from the war in Britain- great for adding period details. I have similar books about the German side of the equation as Third Reich documents and propaganda would have dominated the Netherlands during the occupation.
  • Three special Canadian books on the Netherlands, the Low Countries and the Liberation, told from personal experiences and pointing out key locations of Canadian actions during this time.
  • Older, newer and newest. The publication of books is as yet unabated.

Then, as I realized I needed to learn more about life under the occupation, I supplemented website information and photographic references with these little books of personal anecdotes from survivors of the occupation, either in the Netherlands itself, or in the colonies of the Dutch East Indies, now known as Indonesia. I collected the ones I felt were the most useful and then decided to add some primary material of my own, meeting people who were in the Netherlands during the war and interviewing them. Two of the three interviews I conducted were recorded for posterity.

Why not more interviews, you may ask? I have asked many people. Few wished to discuss their experiences. Others, according to relatives I’ve talked to, had forgotten much over time and could offer little of use. A couple examined the information I brought and said I knew more about aspects of the occupation already than they did… and they lived through it! Having said that, though, every one of those interviews lifted a curtain that was obscuring the vision I had of the world I wanted to created for MANNA. In one case, a look at a design for a kitchen I created raised concerns about the size and I was able to make it more realistic. In another case, my image of tanks and trucks everywhere was debunked quickly by one witness who said luckily the tanks stayed away from his town and only came through when trouble was in the offing. I learned about the use of horses in Holland- thousands of them. I heard about relatives who fought with the Resistance and relatives who were drafted into the army and sent to Russia. I heard stories that surprised me, touched me, horrified me and captivated me. More books reinforced those accounts and enriched them further. For example, reading about Arnhem was one thing. Hearing someone describing the sight of hundreds of transport aircraft flying past her home towards the drop zones at the beginning of Operation Market Garden was something else entirely.

Memories, I learned, could be stronger and more vivid with age than one might assume and attitudes generated by the experience of the war could be hardened surprising by time. “I hope they got what they deserved,” said one witness when he heard about the number Dutchmen who enlisted for the SS divisions formed in the Netherlands and sent to the Eastern Front. Other sentiments- not to be shared here- were also echoed.

These accounts are like gold, and more are being unearthed from sources long silent in the world. DUTCH GIRL, the story of Audrey Hepburn’s experiences in the Netherlands during the war was published just last year, long since she passed away. It’s well worth reading and I found it to be a great addition to my library on the Dutch in the war. To balance the perspective and try to get inside the experiences of Germans in the war, as occupation soldiers and support personnel would have had stories of their own, I read a lot of books about life in the Reich and in its service. A number of these books were memoirs of events that happened in the youth or childhood of the narrators. No one else is left today to tell their stories.

  • This collection of German wartime memoirs- a sample of which is shown here- was put together from clearance house centers, second hand shops and a few from Amazon. Eye-opening is certainly one word for it. Combined with similar German books and memoirs from British, Canadian, American and other perspectives, these stories help give a well-rounded account of life during the war. One wonders how many other even more compelling stories have already been lost to time.
  • As the Holocaust figured prominently in the story- and not just because of Anne Frank being in Amsterdam- I needed to read up on this subject, too. Doing so has changed my life. As an artist, David Oler’s WITNESS is, with IMPRISONED, a horrifying collection of images created either in the camps and hidden or created after the war as a way of coming to terms with what happened. Oler’s book has been loaned out with strict instructions that it should not be read before trying to go to sleep at night. THE HIROSHIMA MURALS occupies this shelf as well because Toshi and Iri Maruki both created murals on the subject after completing their world famous cycle of pieces on the atomic bombings in Japan.

I would say to anyone out there wanting to attempt historic fiction, primary sources where possible are very helpful, but round them out with a range of materials. Be open-minded in terms of where you look. Sometimes, an unlikely place will yield a nugget or two of useful information. Don’t just concentrate on the narrative. Build resources about the whole of the world in which it takes place. It’ll make the story rich and authentic. Think of your story as being like an engine. You see the overall shape of the thing. But you need to remember the hundreds or thousands of parts- some moving and others not- that went into making it what it is. As anyone who’s had car servicing done, those little parts have their roles to play in the smooth operation of the engine. Don’t neglect them in your car any more than you would do so in your story. And finally, take your time in putting it together. The only person you are racing against until the book is complete is yourself and maybe the few friends you had read it at some point. The world is unaware of the thing until it finally appears in print and even then it might not even so much as wobble upon its release. So get it right while you get it done.

Hilde seems happy with her new book. Do it right and you’ll be happy with yours.

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Writings

RESEARCHING ‘MANNA’ PART 1: Colouring a world at war

“…and that’s why we call it ‘research.’ Because we SEARCH and then we RE-SEARCH.”

Dr. Angela Baisley

Angela Baisley was one of the best teachers I ever knew. I met her when she did a teacher exchange many years ago at my school, coming up from Florida- within sight of the Kennedy Space Center and the launchpads that saw beginning of so many historic missions into space. Her knowledge was vast. Her wisdom was great. I believe we truly got the best part of the deal where the exchange was concerned and took away a lot from my time working with her.

Her quote, which I used to begin this article, summed up then as it does now the challenge of writing any work involving history. The challenge only increases when the work involves illustrations or is a graphic novel. Creating aviation art has led to some interesting conversations with people over the years about how one goes about trying to make the piece accurate. I even hosted a talk at the Brampton Public Library years ago on this and enjoyed exchanging ideas with people about ‘historic’ art.

When I began work on MANNA, having wound up SARGASSO temporarily, I knew a long road lay ahead of me where research was concerned. SARGASSO was a fantasy set within an alternate universe that looked a lot like Earth in the early 1900s. Costumes, cars, architecture and such had to be more or less period specific. Beyond that, I could play freely with the world I had created.

MANNA was going to be different. It was set on our world, in our past, featuring locations, events and historic figures that were parts of our history. Getting it wrong was not something one wanted to do. While it is almost impossible to get it completely right, though, all reasonable efforts must be made to try and recreate the era as accurately as possible.

“I believe the true line of research lies in the careful noting and comparison of the smallest details”.

Flinders Petrie

MANNA required research on clothing, housing, transport, landscape and the environment- both rural and populated- to get the look of the Netherlands just right. Holland is more than windmills, bicycles and canals. The countryside may be flat or mildly undulating in most areas, but that doesn’t mean they are like the Canadian prairies or our Rocky Mountains. Early drawings for the graphic novel made the landscape look too open. With more research, I am now getting right the land and the colours within it and setting up scenes that say ‘Holland’, rather than ‘some place with a windmill in it’.

Books and the internet were very helpful to achieve that. However, I had to be careful with the internet, though, because I was not always able to recognize images that had been manipulated through the use of computer software. Collecting lots of pictures would help give me a range of materials so I could make informed decisions about colour choices later.

Ultimately, I know a trip to the Netherlands would be the best way to obtain primary reference material. At the time of writing, however, the global pandemic is making air travel difficult and other considerations continue to keep me at home. Someday, I hope that will change.

“The pictorial battlefield becomes a sea of mud mercifully veiled by the fog of war.”

Winston Churchill

If I find pictures from the war that are themselves in colour, I am very happy, indeed for the benefit of having the material at hand, though the subject matter is often tragic and disturbing. However, film stocks and issues with reproduction on the web make for challenges in themselves when viewing period photos. Old images often have an orange or sepia tint to them. Learning to recognize that when looking at these pictures has helped to avoid some errors when designing scenes for the book. For example, the colour of uniforms and anything to do with camouflage can be hard to figure out using period photos, if the original images have not been kept in good condition before publishing. Using books like the following in the image below, connected with others showing photos from the war, help a lot.

  • A tragic picture of Rotterdam after the bombing in May, 1940, likely taken by Jugo Jaeger. This was from Life magazine’s book series on World War Two, called BLITZKRIEG, by Robert Wernick. (Library of Congress catalogue number 76-25750, originally published in 1977.) The slight tint in the image, making it look pinky and light blue gives away its age.
  • Another image from BLITZKRIEG, taken by Hugo Jaeger from the Time-Life Picture agency. The boys at the right give good reference for the clothing of children at that time. The windmill and houses are also helpful for details like windows, doors, brickwork. And of course, the German uniforms and armour. Images like this are gold to artists looking for reference. Only the colouration needs backing up with more contemporary imagery.

Unfortunately, it still comes down to matching the real colours with the right markers, coloured pencils or pastels in my kit- a problem I faced when creating the image of the Hitler Youth boy alongside other children and the stereotypical German frau in the big image that appears in the entry on MANNA in the gallery of Illustration and Cartooning.

From the Time-Life book THE NEW ORDER, by the editors of Time-Life books. (ISBN 0-8094-6962-6, published 1989.) This kind of reference helps artists because new photography of these uniforms comes with new technology and a better registration of the colours. Still, trying to match this with my materials was a bit tricky until I got the mix right. Other details that confused me were things like socks and boots and how different boys had different configurations in their uniforms. Belt buckles and sashes were a bit small in these images. Other books- the RE-search part of the exercise- helped refine the details better. It would be understandable for you to say “Does it matter?” But when dealing with nit-picky armchair historians who’d rather judge the work of others rather than create judgement worthy work of their own, no detail is too small for notice. And trust me, there’s always at least one in the crowd.

I also find books like the ones below to be of great help in handling details and providing great photographic references to help me draw the uniforms, machinery and settings I need to deal with in MANNA. A series of books from France on the uniforms of British, Canadian and German soldiers were among the more expensive purchases in my library, but easily some of the best. The uniforms photographed are, like the Hitler Youth ones in the picture above, original. The photographs are pin sharp, however, making you see the material in amazing detail. The Osprey books are solid, reliable and full of concise, well-organized information and hugely useful photos and illustrations. Realising that writing a book about the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands was going to require more than pictures of soldiers, I found Osprey provided affordable books to give me reference material on the underpinnings of the occupational forces’ structure, from police to nurses, firemen, communications operations and various auxiliary services. Some of them are illustrated here.

Some of the books above are getting on for 50 years of age. The Cromwell book isn’t even in English, beyond a few captions in the text. It’s Polish. However, as I was buying it for the pictures and diagrams, it didn’t matter. I look at these books and think back that 20-30 years ago, book shops were seemingly knee-deep in texts and picture books about the Second World War. In the 1960s, a lot of books were coming out about the Great War. Why is that, you may ask? These conflicts were 50 years earlier at the time and many of the participants were entering their senior years or starting to pass away. Now- 80 and 100 years on, few, if any, people who lived then remain. Publishers probably perceive that the interest in these events is now limited more to a niche market of enthusiasts. It might explain why newer books like the uniform guides seen below are so much more expensive than a number of the ones above put together. However, it does set up a dangerous problem for us in that as the availability of these books, along with the primary witnesses fade into history, the collective memory of society can be more easily distorted by people who might not our best interests in mind.
Every one of the books here is decades old and second hand. They are still worth more than a lot of the information you will find casting your nets in the deep waters of the Google Sea. It’s kind of ironic that I have to, in a way, go back in time, to find some of the best resources about the war. I don’t mind, though. Losing myself in shops where the shelves are taller than me is a great way to pass the time.

Or should that be ‘pass through time?’

So where do you find these books? Amazon, with its myriad dealers and retailers is one place. One place where I go in person to buy these books is ARMY OUTFITTERS in Toronto, just off the 401 highway on Lesmill Road. It is an amazing place and has done wonders to help me find not only books for the various war stories I am working on, but also books I remember reading from my childhood, when visits to the library were a weekly Friday night occurrence.

Next, having discussed the colours of the war, I will discuss the stories behind it, followed by a reflection on the machinery in MANNA. Check the photographic section for posts related to the book and trips I took to museums and collections over the years. Also, look at the section on models for articles on some of the kits I’ve built so far related to MANNA.

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Photography

PHOTOS FOR ‘MANNA’

EPISODE 1: The Volkswagen Type 166 SCHWIMMWAGEN.

Not all my research for MANNA involves books. Building models is a great way to create miniature representations of the equipment I will be featuring in the book. However, nothing seizes the imagination quite like seeing ‘the real thing’, whether it is a tank, a heavy gun, an airplane, or in this case, a working Schwimmwagen.

It looks like a bathtub on wheels. It even has a propeller on the back that can be lowered into the water so the driver may ‘drive’ across rivers and small lakes. It was built in Germany in the war as an amphibious vehicle, slightly smaller than the VW Beetle, with good handling qualities on land or in the water. According to at least one of my interviewees, a number of them saw service in the Netherlands during the occupation of 1940-1945. This would be hardly surprising considering the number of canals and natural bodies of water in the country.

These pictures were taken at the Ontario Regiment Museum Aquino a few years back. The owner of this working Type 166 had acquired the car from someone in Italy many years before and carefully restored it to its original configuration, complete with the propeller being an authentic wartime vintage artifact bearing the VW logo with the gear surrounding the company initials. (The gear disappeared with the de-Nazification of the company by the British after the war.)

Type 166 Schwimmwagen visiting the Ontario Regiment Museum Aquino located near the Oshawa Airport a few years back.

If the Second World War, its history, equipment, and legacy, interests you, please take time to visit the Ontario Regiment Museum in Oshawa, ON., Canada. There is an excellent book on the regiment’s history I strongly advise you read to put what you see there into context. FIDELIS ET PARATUS, by Sgt. Rod Henderson, is an excellent, authoritative and complete history of the regiment. Many volunteers make this excellent museum ‘go’, and the tank days, when all the armour comes out to play, are well worth attending.

There will be other posts related to this collection and the connections to MANNA coming up in the future. More likely they will be posted on the social media sites attached to this one.

Watch this space…

Categories
Design and Commercial Work Fine Arts

BIG ART BUZZ

A HIVE OF OTHER ACTIVITIES

I joined Big Art Buzz, an artist’s collective for people across Ontario, in 2015. Besides having my work posted on the core website and its social media affiliates, I also enjoy the opportunity to display pieces in person at various events and to conduct demos. Here are some pictures from events that took place in recent years. The first images include pictures of the art work. The last two have me at my table with Keith Moreau, creator and organizer of Big Art Buzz, speaking with visitors. (I can say there’s somewhat less of me now than when those pictures were taken.) You can visit the site at www.bigartbuzz.com. Visit also the Big Art Buzz channel on YouTube. There is also the work of Keith Moreau on YouTube, which if you click on his name in this article you can see.

A collection images from one of our shows at UNIFOR’s Canada Pavilion during an annual festival of world cultures in Brampton.
Categories
Hobbies/Model Building

ALL THIS & WORLD WAR TWO- Part 2

BUILDING THE CROMWELL TANK

The Cromwell tank was very active in Northwestern Europe from D-Day to the end of the war in 1945. Whatever weaknesses it had against German armour like the Tiger, Panther and King Tiger, the Cromwell acquitted itself well as a cruiser tank, using a relatively low profile, good speed and a gun that could match most of what the enemy could throw at it- save for the vehicles mentioned above and the dreaded 88mm field gun.

And… it could fly!

This is a famous image from the war of a Cromwell taking off from a ramp during trials. It’s posted all over the internet, but if someone could give me the source information, I would like to give it a proper citation. The aerodynamic properties of the Cromwell were demonstrated in the Netherlands in 1944 when three of these machines jumped a Dutch canal to escape enemy fire. The canal was later measured to be over 20 feet wide. For a full account, read TROOP LEADER: A Tank Commander’s Story, by Bill Bellamy.

The kit I built was Tamiya’s 1/35 scale Cromwell, a decent model with easy to follow instructions and a great fit in the parts. I had never built a tank before and was nervous, considering the experience I had with the much smaller Austin K2Y ambulance covered in the last article. (Click here for link.) I needn’t have worried. Considering the build was happening during a stressful period in my life involving illness in the family, I found working on the Cromwell to be relaxing.

I built it in two parts- the hull base with the wheels and tracks and the top of the hull with the turret and assorted bits for engine exhaust, towing and such added on. The two halves were sprayed with a base coat of the colour the British were using on their armour at this stage in the war and then given a deliberately sloppy coat of white on top to simulate the winter camouflage that was often hastily applied in the field using a water based lime wash that wore off as the winter ground on. As the wash only went where brushes or mops could be used to slap it on, the finish was inconsistent at best. I then weathered the two halves before joining them, gunking them up with mud, simulated wetness from watery roads, grime and such to show this machine had seen its share of action.

Decals were really hard to apply in places and the fixative didn’t fix very well. Also, there was a problem with the heavy rivets in the turret making it difficult for some of the markings to sit properly on the surface. Decal solvents were of mixed success, so let’s say the whitewash I used served more than one purpose in a couple of places. I learned it was generally accepted to try and paint around unit markings for identification purposes, but best laid plans, etc. sometimes led to the big white star atop the turret being obliterated under a layer of whitewash.

I only hope I will get better with decals as time passes. Tamiya ones in particular do have some annoying habits about them, although the Airfix decals for the Katy also threw a few curves at me.

So, here is my Cromwell. It has made me a fan of armour, as witnessed by the vast collection that has found its way into my studio in the last couple of years.

  • The two halves with just the spray coating applied. They looked like pieces of an old Dinky Toy.
  • Test fitting the two halves. Weathering is started on the lower half of the hull. No tracks fitted yet.
  • The winter whitewash goes on along with weathering around the wheels.
  • the top of the hull. Some parts had to wait until I fitted together the whole tank before being attached, leading to a lot of back and forth in the instructions.
  • Another test fit, post weathering and prior to fitting the tracks and other details.
  • The completed Cromwell.
  • I glued the tracks to the tops of the wheels to get rid of that rubber band effect. I will have to create a diorama for it at some point, but for now the kitchen counter surface looks just wintry enough to work.
One down. Many more to go…
Categories
Illustration and Cartooning

‘MANNA’: A STORY OF HOLLAND AT WAR

This is the big one. This is the biggest project I have ever worked on, let alone the biggest project since SARGASSO. It will be years before it is completed and it is years since it was started. However, I take comfort that Art Spiegelman took 12 years to create his landmark graphic novel MAUS, and other writers and artists have laboured over many years to complete their most famous pieces. If anything it to be learned from this, it is that it’s better to do something like this ‘right and slow’ than it is to do it ‘quick and dirty’. The latter results in a product that cannot come close to respecting its subject and one who cannot respect topics like the Second World War, the horrors of Nazism and the Holocaust, fighting in the war or struggling to survive in an occupied country during the war shouldn’t ever cross my radar, let alone my path.

You can tell I feel strongly about this. You would understand why if you sifted through the thousands of pages of reading I have undertaken since I began to research the book. I defy you to do so and not be moved as I have been throughout this process. It has been a powerful force in my life since I came up with the idea on Christmas Day, back in 2014, and has only grown more so as I meet people who were there and listen to their stories.

FLASHBACK TO THE ORIGINS OF ‘MANNA’

With the completion of the Cartooning certificate program at George Brown College, work in cartooning and illustration did not end. A new program, focusing on the graphic novel, was created at the college and now all work was to be dedicated to ongoing efforts in that area.

The primary assignment we were given was to create a six to eight page story to show we could set up a plot, establish characters, apply skills we had learned in previous courses and somehow put it all together in a short narrative in the media of our choice. Because of some fun I enjoyed working on a recreation of a panel of artwork by Milt Caniff for another course, I wanted to continue with a period theme in my story and relate something to the reader about the Second World War. On Christmas Day, while relaxing after a huge lunch by sitting and reading Edward Jablonski’s massive work, THE AIR WAR, I came across the story of the relief missions flown by bomber crews in the R.A.F., R.C.A.F., R.A.A.F. and U.S.A.A.F., among others, to deliver food to millions of Dutch civilians still living under enemy occupation at the end of the war.

The text and images below illustrate some of what has been accomplished already. Like SARGASSO, this is a substantial undertaking, more in the fact that unlike the former piece, where the illustrations supported the text, the illustrations here dominate the text.

‘MANNA’ CHARACTER DESIGNS

MANNA is a coming of age story set in the Netherlands mostly during the Second World War. It features two central characters- Pauli, a riches to rags girl who befriends Hilde, from an artistically and financially richer background and almost two years her junior, in the last few years before the outbreak of war in 1939. Together, as they mature, they endure the Nazi invasion and occupation and struggle to survive in a world that becomes darker and more hostile with each passing day. It is a macro to micro kind of story, with the events in the lives of our protagonists set against the massive events reshaping the world around them. For anyone who had relatives who lived in Holland during the Second World War or anyone who has read or known the story of Anne Frank, it is not hard to imagine the kinds of things that will be dealt with in this narrative. Originally designed as a short, (six to eight), page story, it has grown- through the encouragement of several people who have seen the plan of the thing- into a massive undertaking that will easily breach 100 plus pages. Like SARGASSO, it has required a lot of research, filling my shelves with many new books on all aspects of issues related to it or the war in general.

Below is the character sheet for the two leads. Pauli is in yellow ochre, and her palette will be consistently made of warm, sometimes bright colours. Hilde will be wearing greens, blues and cooler or pastel related colours. Her red hair is a factor in this. They are presented here as they appear at the beginning of the story, which is in late August, 1938, before the events of Munich and Chamberlain’s ‘peace in our time.’

MANNA CHARACTER SHEET. Copyright C.A. Seaman, 2015. Coloured marker on illustration board.

SELECTED IMAGES AND PROCESS WORK ON THE MAIN CHARACTERS & SETTINGS

Selected images from portrait studies, panels in process and other sources showing Pauli on her own, in relation to other characters and in a variety of situations. Further images show other pages in process or completion.
The first three pages of MANNA, without the text. At least a couple of people have said they can figure out what is going on without the text, but the narrative on the page complements the images and enriches the experience, rather than simply describing what is happening.

MANNA- EARLY TITLE PAGE SPREAD

A full colour title page spread was planned for the book, according to the script I wrote in the winter/spring of 2015. It was not going to be completed at the time, as I was planning to concentrate on the pages afterwards for the course work. When I was asked to participate in Big Art Buzz’s presentation at the Canadian Pavilion in July, 2015 as a guest artist, that changed. I was to do a demo and said, with everything else going on, I wasn’t interested in creating something just for the exhibition. I went to the instructor of the course and said I was going to include the spread now as a part of the final project and as the demo piece for the show.

The individual pages were to be 10″ wide and 15″ high, which when reduced would be compatible with traditional graphic novel formats. Thus, a two page spread would be 20″ wide by 15″ high, or twice the width. Based on the research done on clothes, bikes and aircraft, the final composition was designed first in Poser, and then drawn onto sketch paper at full scale. I only applied shading to the girls in the original drawing, and thus, that is the only part I’ve shown below.

Here are shots of the girls in progress, showing watercolour washes and layers of coloured pencil applied on top. You may notice Pauli’s legs were very skinny in the pencil drawing. They were beefed up a little in the final, but not too much, though, because she would have been thin anyway. At that point in the story, the average food intake for the Dutch was equal to 250 calories a day. We average over 2,000.

  • Drawing set up
  • Process laying down wet media undercoat
  • The final with coloured pencil blended in

SOME NOTABLE DETAILS

In case you are wondering about the bike, it is a construct based on a Hungarian design, modified with wooden wedges shoved into the metal rims of the wheels to replace the rubber tires which would have been likely confiscated by the Germans during the war. Packages of food from a ‘hunger trek’ into the country fill the basket and rear pannier. Neither Hilde or Pauli are wearing socks, but Pauli is wearing some cut down boots, likely from a Dutch worker. How Pauli got them is a matter for speculation. Hilde’s shoes are improvised sandals cut from worn out saddle shoes popular at the end of the 1930s. Both coats are period accurate. Hilde’s hair is short, typical of her style anyway, but also practical in the later months of the war, when water, soap and shampoo were all in short supply because of the occupation forces’ closing of the borders around the Netherlands not liberated in Operation Market Garden, (September, 1944). In this image, Pauli’s hair is long. However, in more recent art, I have made it shorter as well for the reasons stated above.

As you can see the composition was designed to have nothing of importance to the right, as that would have been where the gutter between the pages would be. I still had to make it interesting enough not to make this design choice obvious, however. The final piece had to hang together and hang apart.

The sky was finished with coloured pencil. A tip: Prismacolour’s Light Cerulean Blue is a perfect match for Winsor & Newton’s Cerulean Blue! Blending was achieved with colourless blenders by Prismacolour and Derwent, the latter being better for covering the illustration board, which was Canson watercolour paper based on an acid free board support. The problem when working with this material is that little white spots where the paint or coloured pencil don’t reach really stand out when the work is scanned. The Lancaster bomber below, dark in colour, was problematic in this area, looking sparkly when scanned later. A solvent like Turpentine applied with a brush ‘solved’ the problem, filling the gaps nicely. Another tip: get the orange scented solvent. It’s a lot easier to work with in the studio.

Other problem areas included the tree line at the edge of the field. More grey and even pink went into that area than green. A little green goes a long way. Green is very difficult to work with in art, often being far too intense when applied out of the tube. In the distance, make it as blue grey as possible, and if warmth is needed, a soft pink from Derwent will tone down the problem spots. The amount of paint on the board caused mild warping, which is slowly levelling out after months of touring about in flat-pack portfolios. Applying primer to the back did not help straighten the board. I will have to deal with this again as at least three more pieces are planned in this format for each section in the book.

In historic details, this whole scene was a bit of a construct fantasy. A cordon would likely have been put around the field. Guards would be standing by organized piles of food. The danger of overshoots and missed drops was very real during Operation Manna/Chowhound in 1945. Looting was also a concern at the time, although incidents of it seem to have been very few. For the sake of providing a way of setting up the title in an homage to Will Eisner, who used creative ways to introduce his graphic stories to readers, I did what I did to make it work. The characters just happen to be excited speactators like their real-life counterparts from the war, enthusiastically waving at the aircraft with their last bit of energy. The more recent version includes more historically accurate details.

The decorated sacks- assuming the armed guards I mentioned earlier are off-screen (^_^)- sit on the ground after having been organized by workers on site, who had to dash out onto the field and grab what they could between drops. Piles of uncollected sacks lie in the distance. You can see I have started building layers of colour here, combining washes with coloured pencil to fill in areas of detail. Note the grey of the buildings in the background. The intense green you see here was virtually gone by the time the piece was done.

THE LANCASTER

The Lancaster itself is a real aircraft, but the squadron markings are not. 642 Squadron never existed. TZ was never used. I have not seen tails painted in bold orange and blue patterns. (Can you guess the symbolism?) I created them all after doing research and deciding with the instructor of the course it was better to create a fictitious unit for equally fictitious characters than use a set real squadron numbers and unknowingly make an OTU into a Bomber Command Squadron and have someone from a society in the UK point it out nicely or otherwise. I have explained to some who feel such research and detail is overdoing it in art, that those interested in this kind of material take such things very seriously. In short, if you are not interested in trying to make it real enough, don’t try historic themes in your graphic novels.

DETAILS…

The Lancaster was painted black underside. Canadian-built Lancasters had shiner finishes than British-built machines. Whatever the finish, the effect of reflected light from the ground would have meant anyone creating this subject in art would be using little black in the colour. Greys, blues and earth tones dominate. Even white, in places. Solvent was used to blend the colours. Grey is used for the sacks falling from the bomb bay. Most of the food was dropped in cases or bags that once contained cement mix, chosen to withstand the impact of being dropped from 150-1,000 feet in the air.

THE FINAL PIECE

A FORMAT REVISION AND NEW ART

In 2017, I was confronted with the reality that the illustration boards I’d been using for pages in the book were no longer being produced. I switched over to Canson’s comic art paper and found the format was different enough from the sizing used in the boards to make redoing the early pages necessary. I took the opportunity to re-imagine some of the stylizing of the book at the same time and explore media that would allow me to create soft painterly effects without actually painting on the Canson paper, which would buckle if washes were applied to the surface. Eventually, I found powdered pastels did the job well and even blended with the Copic markers, conte and charcoal.

As before, using the models of the characters created in Poser, I made sets and ‘shot’ scenes based on sketches done on mock layout pages. Poser gives me the opportunity to move the camera and search for better angles before committing scenes to paper. From there, I drew out the page in full size and transferred it to the board for inking. What follows are some revised pieces and drawings for pages not yet completed. Click on them for enlargements.

All materials related to MANNA are copyright C.A. Seaman, 2015-2020. Nothing of what you see here may be reproduced in any manner without written permission from the author/artist.

LIKE MANNA FROM HEAVEN, MORE TO COME…

A final note here. Please check the rest of the website for further articles related to MANNA. In the section on HOBBIES/MODEL BUILDING there are articles on building some of the cars, ships and armour used in the book. This will grow on both the website and social media as both become available. Also, in the section on WRITINGS there will be articles about the extensive research that went into the book to do what is possible to fact check and keep errors to a minimum- as it will be impossible to eliminate them entirely. Finally, in PHOTOGRAPHY there will be entries related to the photo research I’ve done in museums and exhibitions. Credit to related institutions will be given with each entry. If you find links or information of your own, please contact me through the Comments section and I will happily follow up with you.

Categories
Illustration and Cartooning

THE ART OF REPRODUCTION

No, it’s not what you think!

In my courses at George Brown, a valuable part of the instructive process involved reproducing panels from existing cartoons, comic strips and graphic novels. It was a great way to learn the techniques of others, test one’s observation skills, and through the use of comparable media, broaden one’s range in terms of drawing and painting. In one case, reproducing a comic strip had us taking the last panel- which had been blanked out- and creating our own ending for it. Cheating by looking up the original strip was not encouraged. Tracing wasn’t an option either. These exercises were meant to give us something like an atelier experience, where students can spend years copying from plasters and the works of the old masters before venturing out to create their own pieces from scratch. It worked for us. I remember one of the most unusual things I had to sort out was a foot belonging to Dennis the Menace. Hank Ketchum’s rendering of it was stylized, to say the least. In among the other elements, it was unremarkable. Once you looked at it on its own, it became something otherworldly and very strange.

  • The reproduction of a Calvin & Hobbes strip with my own take on the final panel.
  • The photocopy of the Dedini piece I chose, with sketches around the margins.
  • The final version.
  • My drawing of the Dennis the Menace panel.
  • Completed with inking.
  • A page reproduced from a manga. The only time I ever touched mange in the courses.
  • Calvin & Hobbes anthology cover reproduction.
  • The original scan of Milt Caniff’s Steve Canyon piece
  • My drawing, using the placement of the engines on the DC-4 to scale the piece
  • My reproduction, done with pen and ink and gouache.

Categories
Illustration and Cartooning

ZEPHYR CROW

Zephyr Crow is a teenager living with her sister Bunty and her grandfather, Howard Elbee- a retired special effects movie magician from before the days of computers. Zephyr and Bunty’s divorced parents work separately overseas and have left the kids with the one relative they can trust. Howard, a widower, enjoys the company of his grand-daughters, and on the surface all seems relatively normal as they carry on from day to day.

Except for the fact that in Zephyr, Howard, and Bunty’s world normal is defined very differently from what one what imagine. Think Addams Family meets films about Hollywood…

That’s all I am going to tell you because this project is slated for further development, but has been on hold for a while. It was originally developed for the second of the cartooning courses I took at George Brown College and, modified to fit the needs of this particular Cartooning course, took on some interesting dimensions. (To read about the first Cartooning course, refer to the post on Andi, the beach princess with a difference.) What follows is development work, character sketches and completed projects like a sample one panel image, two comic strips and a projected cover design for an imagined anthology. These were all assessed projects and were all hugely useful in developing skills for me in sequential art.

ZEPHYR, BUNTY & HOWARD

  • Drawing of proposed title logo
  • Early Zephyr expressions
  • Early concepts of Zephyr
  • Zephyr
  • Zephyr
  • Pencil rough of Zephyr
  • Character sheets with rotations and gestures
  • Bunty gestures
  • Bunty gestures
  • Pencil gesture of Bunty
  • Early Bunty study
  • Bunty and a ‘friend’
  • Howard in gesture poses

OTHER CHARACTERS…

If Bunty is Zephyr’s foil in this story, other characters are actively supporting her in her adventures. I have not considered villains here as they are more likely to emerge with the stories. What appears are some of the peculiar neighbours Zephyr has, like Monsieur Aggot, a single parent and former horror film star. Monsieur Aggot is a family man as loves his children equally. He is also a real gentleman with fine manners.

  • Pencil study
  • Character sheet with rotations and some of his children

THE PROJECTS: 1 A single panel comic

The single panel comic was given to us as a way of exploring the characters in a given scenario. It was completed in pen and ink, with no use of wash or mixed media. There was guidance in terms of the subject, directing it had to be humourous. I think the dialogue was also given to us and we had to fit the subject to the line. Also, there had to be a visible demonstration of grid use and one point perspective in the piece. A good challenge, especially as Zephyr was developing as a much more serious project at that time.

Below are some process frames and the final project. You can enlarge a several images by clicking on them.

  • Original drawing with a grid
  • Drawing with demonstration of one point perspective
  • Final piece
Some good points , but it was my least favourite of the project pieces I created. Too much stuff in it. Too much referential material. I also hated my lettering and thought the inking lacked polish.

THE PROJECTS: 2 A Second single panel piece, using wash and two point perspective in the design

Now we are rolling along with the characters, we step up the work with a new scenario involving real estate, new personalities like Monsieur Aggot and his maggot children, the pet dog and the above mentioned technical requirements. The first image was a two point perspective exercise I did to work out the dimensions in the piece and set the characters in their correct proportions. Yes, Monsieur Aggot is one big bug. He also has a really interesting back story, but I don’t want to share it here.

  • Setting up the two point perspective
  • I printed out the perspective sheet full size and drew Zephyr, Bunty and the children into it. Monsieur Aggot was composited using photo rendering software.
  • Close up
  • Cleaned up drawing. Note the new poses for the children.
  • The final piece
Happiness is getting to use a wash with pen and ink. I liked the New Orleans funeral procession in the draft but decided the eating of scraps from the dump was a better fit in the end.

THE PROJECTS: 3 Four panel comic strip

Next, we took the characters, introduced more into the piece and had to develop a four panel work on them. I was having trouble with my drawing hand at the time and created all the panels full page size first, then scanned and reduced them into the final piece to put less stress of cramping my hand with small details. It also helped me see what was worth keeping after the overload of the first piece. I had a lot more fun with this and pared down the texture a lot, giving the strip a cleaner look. If you wonder why there is so much open space at the top, remember it has to be kept clear to fit the dialogue.

The original panels are included separately and together. Click on them, etc., etc. to get bigger images.

Much more effective use of line and texture. Still hate my lettering, but not nearly as much as in Project 1. Poor Zephyr’s face is a bit twisted in Panel 3.

THE PROJECTS: 4 Full colour weekend paper comic strip

The four panel strip was a great way to develop the characters and I was stronger in my sense of what to do with them. This was a fun work to do, pulling in mixed media and full colour. I can’t recall too much else about requirements of the assignment, but getting into the rhythm, I drew the original panels large, but in scale to the finals and reduced them. It may seem like a lot of work, but I know of other professional artists- their names escape me- who do the same thing for the same reasons, often going into completing the panels and then assembling them later in the computer. I can see that in my future for graphic novel projects.

The story is, incidentally, based on something that actually happened to me once when I took a class outside to draw trees and nature and had one preferring to sit in the sun and download her images from Google.

You can’t make this stuff up. Click on the images….

  • 1
  • 2- flashback
  • 3
  • 4-5 Wally Wood always to reuse panels to save time. Who am I to argue with him?
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9
  • Layout before images were added
I had a lot of trouble scanning this piece. The watercolour was a lot smoother than it projected in this image. The red type in the title also should have been orange, but I could not get the balance on that without throwing off everything else. My lettering is looking a bit better now.

THE PROJECTS: 5 ANTHOLOGY COVER

The final project with Zephyr and Bunty was an anthology cover. We studied covers from various works like CALVIN & HOBBES, among others, and considered what time of year it would likely be released. Christmas was coming, so why not? As you can see, there were many parts to the project. Two point perspective, which for me had vanishing points 12 feet, (almost four meters), apart and leading to the parts of the planning being done in the computer using a cg grid. The final piece had to have several versions, as you can see here.

Enjoy…

  • Preparing two point perspective scene
  • Completed
  • Playing with models in Poser for ideas- one of several scenes
  • Creating the drawing with the group
  • Compositing the characters with the scene
  • Cropping to create the final composition
  • Finished line art
  • Graphite version
  • Watercolour monochrome version
  • Full colour final in pen and ink, watercolour mixed media
People love the maggot children. I’ve even been asked to draw them at Free Comics Day, instead of the usual superheroes.

I would like to revisit this someday. It has light and dark elements to it that should appeal to a wide audience. Perhaps a collaboration of sorts might be in order to get it moving. Perhaps I should just make clones of myself instead…

No, I don’t think so.

Categories
Illustration and Cartooning

ANDI- A BEACH PRINCESS WITH A TWIST

Before you go on, this is NOT some tone deaf sexist comic piece.

Andi actually is a remarkably complex character who hopefully will sometime once again see the light of day on my art table. She was created for the first Cartooning course I took at George Brown, and a lot of work went into filling out her character. Part of it came from others in the class, who contributed excellent suggestions when we exchanged drawings and brief outlines of our characters one night with each other and the recipient added a second drawing of a foil for our character on the spot and gave broad strokes to a backstory for that person. It was one of the best exercises I did in that class and made me much more confident in what I was doing later.

DEVELOPMENT OF ANDI AND OTHERS

Miranda Andrew- Andi for short, was a rebel in her youth, getting pregnant at 16 and being thrown out of the house and her school. She went to live with an aunt, a progressive woman with liberal democratic ideas and a strong sense of justice for people who have rarely experienced it. She is also a cancer survivor, an activist and the perfect role model for Andi as she seeks to find her place in the world. The aunt lives on the coast and gives Andi a trailer on the beach to call home. Andi completes her education slowly, through night school and correspondence, has frequent run-ins with authorities who want to separate her from her son and over time develops into a clone of her aunt, ready to pick up where she leaves off when she goes into battle with the big C once more.

Actually, as I read this, I’m really thinking Andi is currently the right person in the right place at the right time. However, when the work was done several years ago, I only had time to develop what you see here before moving on to the next project, Zephyr Crow. Read about that in the post of the same name, coming out soon.

Many exercises in drawing were done to build confidence in rendering characters and drawing them quickly in a variety of gestures without models for reference. The same applied to settings, sidekicks, foils and secondary or antagonistic characters. Here are some of the drawings that came out of those exercises.

  • Early gesture test while sorting out the figure
  • Gestures 2
  • Gestures 3
  • Character design sheet after preliminary work. Body joints had to be shown in non-photo blue pencil on the final image.
  • Details 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
Final piece in the course. Dialogue line was supplied. We had to build the single panel comic art around it. I threw in a lot stage business on this and it was fun for people to go and find these Easter eggs, but as I was to discover later in other Cartooning courses, it would not be wise to do it on every piece.

Categories
Illustration and Cartooning

CARTOONING-2

COMICS AND FAN ART FROM THE ARCHIVES

As with anime and manga, I have been called a fan of comics. While not as touchy about that label, I still feel it is too compartmentalizing. If you have visited other postings in this website, you know there is more to me than the sum of one or two parts. Nonetheless, I have enjoyed creating works in the style of North American comics. What follows are some pieces from the archives of the old website.

  • Poisy Ivy in Repose
  • Catwoman print in mixed media
  • Batgirl (Casandra Cain)
  • From the Island of Misfit Toys
  • Black Widow
  • Black Widow mixed media
  • Harley Quinn, inspired by L’IL GOTHAM
  • Harley Quinn
  • Line study of Hit Girl
  • My take on Joker
  • Poison Ivy in Autumn- completed long before L’IL GOTHAM had Ivy going into a depression over the arrival of the harvest season and the coming of winter.

FREE COMICS DAY AND OTHER REQUEST DRAWINGS

One of the enjoyable things about being involved with comics and sequential art is that I get to participate in Free Comics Day as a guest artist at Comic Book Addiction in Whitby. For several hours, I speak to fans of comics- all ages, mind you- and draw quick sketches for them while they wait. These are not polished pieces; just quick renders that the person can take away with them. It’s busy but wonderful fun and having the company of a good friend during the day makes it easier. However, the biggest thrill I get from it is the chance to talk to fans and find out what inspires them about the characters they choose. I learn a lot about what is currently popular and what stories are grabbing the attention of people these days.

Below are some sketches done not just for FCD, but also requests by fans outside the venue of the comic shop. Those lead off the next gallery, followed by the quick ‘done in minutes’ sketches at the store. Please excuse the quality of those photos. They were taken on the fly with the cell phone and like an idiot, I tended to cast my own shadow on them.

Which one of the FCD drawings was my favourite? As the compositions were often suggested by the recipients- who had some interesting mash-ups in mind, I think those were the most interesting. Hulk in a snowball fight with Olaf, Darth Vader and Chewie playing chess, Thor inviting Hulk to a dainty little tea.

  • Sonic!

In another post, I will share the creation of a comic book cover for a friend featuring one of STAR WARS’ favourite characters- Darth Vader!

Did you think I was going to say Jar-Jar Binks?

Categories
Illustration and Cartooning

CARTOONING-1

ANIME/MANGA PIECES FROM THE ARCHIVES

I like the look of some manga and anime. I have often been called a ‘fan’ of it, which I resent intensely, because it is a label that carries baggage in terms of pre-conceptions and associations that make me uncomfortable. While occasionally I stylize my work so that people say it reminds them of manga, I rarely actively embrace the concepts completely to do work that can actually be called manga or anime.

Having said that, I posted images in past versions of the website that definitely have that manga look about them. Some of the pieces were for students to copy, feeding into their interests and giving them the chance to develop their skills. The gallery below is filled with selected postings from that era, some of which haven’t seen the cybernetic light of day in years.

  • Thank-you piece for a great peer tutor
  • Another peer tutor piece
  • Take a wild guess…
  • This was a great team
  • I usually posted this in the classroom before reports came out. It never failed to grab their attention.
  • This piece was actually published as fan art in NEON GENESIS EVANGELION: THE SHINJI IKARI RAISING PROJECT. (Vol. 3) It’s mixed media coloured pencil with graphite.
  • Test study for the students
  • Another one
  • Study for texture, detail, contrast and value
  • For the modified students at the old school
  • The Girl is a computer generated model that has been around for years. These studies were from poses set up in Poser, drawn when I was switching over to cg models in my art classes to deal with absenteeism among students, allowing them to keep up when, with live models, they would otherwise have foundered. And you know what? IT WORKED!
  • The Girl study- 2
  • More finish on the pieces to give students working exemplars.
  • Exemplars- 2
  • Exemplars- 3
  • Exemplars- 4
  • I made these and photocopied them for students to shade or colour when they completed their work. There were about 30 or so, but I am just highlighting a couple here. It was good practice for me and nicer than downloading them off Google, which had started only three years earlier.
  • Yeah… okay. It was a weird time.
  • Goth

Categories
Design and Commercial Work

CORRUPTED

CHARACTER DESIGNS FOR AN X-BOX INDIE VIDEO GAME

The story of CORRUPTED began just as work on SARGASSO, my self-published series of books, was winding down. ‘People who knew people’ stuff happened and I was offered the chance to meet Paul and Jeff, who were developing this game for the X-Box Indie platform. We got along well and before long, I was brought in to work on character designs for the project.

Here are some things you might want to know about me at the time I began work on CORRUPTED.

  • I had never played a video game on either X-Box, Playstation, or Nintendo beyond Wii. I had flown a bit on Microsoft’s Flight Simulator, (and got vertigo on the screen?!), played some games on a desktop computer that had me using directional keys to steer cars onto sidewalks and fun stuff like that. But that was it.
  • I had no formal training in character design.
  • Any character design I had done was based on looking at model sheets I saw in books and copying the format of figure rotations and gestures. “If that’s how Disney does it, I can too.”
  • I had no concept about the architecture of what these games looked like, what sprites were, what characters and stories were popular in gaming culture or anything like that beyond FINAL FANTASY, because of the anime connections it had.

Basically, I was clueless. And being clueless made me perfect for the job apparently because although I had what was then self-taught art smarts, some skills and experience publishing a few books, my mind was a blank slate untouched by the influences of video games. Consequently, I wouldn’t inadvertently slip in some materials that buried themselves in my subconscious from previous game play experiences, leaving potential players saying things like “Hey! That’s just like the Blade of Pohtus used by Dojt Sryvat from MAGA 4: WASTELANDS OF THE REPUBLIC!”

Fans can be annoyingly observant about things like that…

Anyway, here we were, embarking on this amazing journey, and I must say I have only fond memories of my experiences with Paul, Jeff and the creative process that went into CORRUPTED. It was, in the end, what brought me to taking courses at George Brown and finally learning what all that stuff I’d been doing was actually called.

There are three parts to this story. Scroll down to read them and see the accompanying process work.

ROUGH DESIGNS

Paul saw my work from SARGASSO and while he was impressed with the illustrations, he wasn’t sure I had what he and Jeff needed for the game until I started pulling out books on manga character design and he identified with the super-deformed characters called ‘chibi’. Chibi is a super-cute form of manga character design where the figure is about three to four heads tall and the eyes are huge. The body proportions are all distorted so even crazy looking weapons look ‘cute’ to an outsider. Knowing I had resources and watching me explain them, Paul agreed to meet me again once I came up with some concepts. For that, I needed information on the characters- who they were and what they were like. I took the information and began with some further research into video game character designs, receiving much help from students in the form of screengrabs of sprites from ZELDA. One even tried to create sprites of his own to show me how it was done. From there, I sat down one day while the classes were working and I had nothing else to do and came up with two ‘chibi’ styled characters.

You can see the guidelines on the knight as I blocked out the character. The other one was something I did for fun, turning out to be a big hit with the students. They loved the antenna and the Jawas look to it, but really went mad over the fact the skulls on the belt were supposed to talk, hurling abuse at passersby. Originally, I was going to keep that one for myself, but with the work on SARGASSO taking up so much time, I decided to gift him to Paul and Jeff, who made him into the merchant for CORRUPTED.

Two elements carried on from this sketch of the knight to the final version, ie. the breastplate and aggressive posture. Everything else, as the character evolved, changed. As uniformity was going to be key, I did more reading, purchasing a great book called SUPER CUTE! KODOMO MANGA, written and illustrated by Kamikaze Factory from Spain and published by Collins Design (ISBN 978-0-06-192755-3). From that research, I created my own original base body template, based on a ninja pose on page 206 that caught the eye of the guys when they first saw the book. Thus, in a scrum around the dining room table in my house, we could now bash out ideas for the characters and just draw on the sheets until the pile was exhausted. The interesting thing was, though, given the information I had from Paul and Jeff, when we sat down to do this and I showed them the first revised concept, they went for it with only minor changes.

Anybody need some template sheets? I’ve got lots left over!

These were the base templates. The image below was the first- and main development sketch for what would become the evil knight in CORRUPTED.

A helmet design would emerge in much the same way and, unchanged, I will show it in the next section. I wanted the knight to be shown in action as befitted the nature of the game. So, the template was created to work with this as the premise from the beginning. We also worked on swords, bows and arrows and created a list of characters to be created at that point. Then, as you will see in the next section, I would create the unifed character reference sheets for an animator to use in creating the sprites. Click on “Final Character Designs” to see how they came out.

CHARACTER DESIGNS

I knew the animator would need to have characters that worked from all angles, with armour and clothes lining up in multiple poses. Having read many books on the making of movies and series, I decided to create for the main characters- the evil knight, the good knight and the princess- templates with front, side, back and top views done to scale on a grid background. For the others, top and front views would do. Paul and Jeff wanted the characters to be see from the top in the game, so it was agreed to put some emphasis on heads where possible.

To unify the designs, I fired up Poser on the computer and opened Sadie a computer model who was the foundation of the original Poppy in SARGASSO. (Refer to the article on the art of SARGASSO to see some imagery to put this into context.) Enlarging her head and making her body as gender neutral as possible, I created the above mentioned views by rendering her from those angles with Poser’s cameras. By not moving the cameras once they were loaded, I was able to guarantee consistency in proportions and scale in the renderings, making it easier to line them up on the grid I would later create in Corel Photopaint.

This is Sadie, in case you haven’t seen her before.

This is how I modified her for the body template. Note how the camera names are on the images I composited. I also enlarged the feet, as requested by Paul and Jeff.

Below is how I drew on the costume for the evil knight over the photocopied template. I followed the same process for all the characters, thus keeping them fairly consistent.

From there, I took the images to Staples, photocopied the sets and shaded on the back of each copy with a soft pencil. I then carbon-traced out the drawings to clean paper. As the grid was only useful for the initial layout to keep everything lined up, I did not need it for the final inking, which was done afterwards. I use carbon-tracing often when working on large projects to preserve all reference materials in case of a foul-up and this has proven to be a smart practise over the years on those occasions when I have had to modifiy a piece or redo the final work. I also keep the reference materials after the job is done for years in many cases, just so I can recall the creative processes used when I need to do so.

THE EVIL KNIGHT- FINAL INKS

The top of the head was an important part of the design as this was what players would see most when playing the game. With the chibi design, it meant the head would overwhelm everything else around and beneath it. Thus, the evil creature possessing the knight was created as a focal point. I think that was my idea, but I could be mistaken. Looks nasty, though.

THE GOOD KNIGHT

The armour on the evil knight was meant to be spiky and concave, glowing green between the plates. By contrast, I suggested the good knight should have softer forms and curves, with the armour looking more like the material I saw in reference books I consulted from the local library’s childrens’ section. Good call on the part of the librarian who helped me. The best books really were there- not in the adult section upstairs.

THE PRINCESS

There is a reason why she is barefoot. I suggested she might have been grabbed from her chambers while engaging in her daily ablutions. There was something innocent in this presentation as well, I thought, and I transferred it to the final cover art.

THE MERCHANT

I moved the skulls to the front for more impact and gave ‘him’ nasty looking nails and a little more detail on the cloak to make him look a little less like a Jawa.

THE RANGER AND VILLAGER

What can I say about the Ranger? Everything I’ve ever seen of them in fantasy art seems fairly consistent. Paul, Jeff and I agreed to keep it within those common concepts. As for the villager, he looks like he could be happy in a field, at the forge, or behind the counter of the local tavern.

To see how the cover and the animated evil knight came together, click on the link “The Cover Art and Logo.”

COVER, LOGO AND ANIMATION

Once the characters were done and signed off, it was a race to get the cover completed. Time was flying and I needed to start prep work for the main gig- school. Paul, Jeff and I worked through some ideas and I developed some concepts using Poser and Corel Photopaint which I thought might work. Neither Paul nor Jeff felt the love, though, and these early efforts simply became stepping stones to the final work. The meeting when we hashed out the cover concept, though, was some of the best fun I had in the whole project. It was like being in the big studios working through a creative session on a movie where everything went on the table and was bounced around until it stuck or fell apart.

Poser was fantastic as a pre-visualization tool at this stage. I used the Sadie base I developed for the templates and posed versions of her with prop weapons and sets to give the guys a feeling for the final piece. They made suggestions and eventually, we agreed on this composition after I tweaked three versions and they cast ballots by phone and email.

I blew up the images and carbon traced these basic forms onto larger art sheets- one each for the good and evil knight. With those templates, I then drew the armour, weapons and costumes based on the original designs. The new drawings became the foundation for the final work.

Without the CG base reference for proportions, I don’t think I could have finished the piece in time. I prefer going freehand whenever possible, but that armour and the princess’s dress was very hard to do. So having the bathing suit Sadie template as a guideline made getting to the freehand stage a lot faster. As you can see below, the guidlines are still in place, although the bodies have disappeared under the clothes and armour. Only the face of the princess remained relatively un-altered at this stage. The background is clear in both images.

I added all the buildings and background elements directly to the final piece later, hoping all the time they would work with the characters and not overwhelm them.

Please note in the gallery below, double-click on each image to bring up a larger version in a separate gallery.

  • The heroic knight…
  • …fights the possessed villain of the story
Drawing for the cover art

Back to Staples to create photocopies of these drawings. They would be transferred afterwards onto the 100lb paper I bought for the final art. What follows are snapshots I took as the work progressed. They are not very good, but did give Paul and Jeff tantalizing glimpses of what was to come. Paul and Jeff wanted the final work in coloured pencil- something I had not used on this scale since 2007. It was great getting back to it, though. There’s so much computer work out there that people forget that wonderful results can be obtained from these simple tools.

  • Process 2
  • Process 3
  • Detail
  • Detail
The final product

Look closely…

Did you see it? Just before I finished this part of the image, I reversed the sword in the hand of the evil knight. Check the transfer drawing again if you missed it. I was not happy with the piece as I working on it, but could not put my finger on it, being too close to the work. The moment I concentrated on the sword, I knew that was the problem. Once flipped, I felt hugely better about the piece and it was done in no time.

This is actually a mixed media work. The sky and stones are done with graphite pencils. Only the buildings and characters are completed with coloured pencils. The cover design at the top of the page has the colours tweaked a little from what you see here, which is closer to the original. However, I think the cover with the composited title looks wonderful. I don’t know who did it as I signed off after the cover was done. I definitely like it, though.

THE LOGO

This was the second design. Green was the order of the day. I used red in the earlier version with original text I created that looked like a graffiti tag. As you can see, if you compare this one with the logo on the cover art at top, the texture on the letters has been redone. We agreed on what you see here, but I like the other on the final cover better. It looks like scales! Oh, the nasty looking thing underneath is a view of the sword in regular graphite pencil.

A WONDERFUL SURPRISE!

This arrived in an email one day- the evil knight as rendered by an animator in Sweden. If you read Paul and Jeff’s blog at the time, you could follow links to the creator’s own site. I think the drawings translated really well into the final model. The sword was simplified in the blade, but the handle remained pretty much as imagined. And you should have seen this guy move in the demo animation!

And that was it. At the time of writing, the game was still available on the X-Box Indie platform. People I’ve talked to who played it had a lot of fun. I did get an X-Box later and played a few games on it, but never became a huge fan because of the time involved and all the other projects I wanted to work on. I will not say ‘no’ to another stint of character design, though. CORRUPTED was just too much fun.

Categories
Photography

COLOUR PHOTOGRAPHY

MORE IMAGES FROM THE ARCHIVES

The following galleries are from the old website, featuring images that were taken during the 1990s and 2000s. As on the page of black and white images, a number are reproduced from old prints. I transitioned completely to digital with the purchase of an SLR camera sometime around 2005.

TOKYO

In March, 2004, I visited Japan for the first time, spending the week in Tokyo going on tours and doing a lot of walking around the place. Tokyo has to be one of the cleanest, and most workable big cities I’ve ever visited. With a population of 12.8 million, I was truly amazed by how easy it was to get around, and how polite people there were. They certainly show us how it’s done! Anyway, here are some of the 100 plus photos I took while there, visiting places like the Meiji Shrine, the Asakusa Kinnon Temple, Ginza, the Imperial Palace, and Tokyo Bay. Frankly, I’m not a fan of big cities, but Tokyo works so well I’d move there in a second. Don’t even get me started on the anime and manga… I have grouped the larger images within the galleries, so you may not have hyperlinks off all the thumbnails below. This way, all the various locations can be grouped together where necessary.

Click on each of the images in all the galleries to hopefully open and explore larger versions of them.

  • Asakusa Kanon Temple 1
  • Asakusa Kanon Temple 2
  • Asakusa Kanon Temple 3
  • Asakusa Kanon Temple 4
  • Imperial palace public gardens
  • Temple shrines
  • Tokyo temple
  • Shinto shrine
  • Shinto shrine 2
  • Shinto shrine 3
  • Shinto shrine 4
  • Tokyo Bay
  • Studio Ghibli museum 1
  • Tokyo candy store
  • Asakusa market
  • Residental Tokyo
  • Imperial palace public gardens 2
  • Imperial palace public gardens 3
  • Imperial palace public gardens 4
  • Classic Tokyo intersection
  • Famous Tokyo theatre
  • Tokyo shrine
  • Highways made earthquake proof
  • Studio Ghibli museum 2
  • Museum of Modern Art Tokyo
  • Bridge across one of many rivers in Tokyo
  • Tokyo tree bundled up for the winter
  • Imperial palace public gardens 5
  • Tokyo shrine
  • Tokyo shrine
  • Tokyo shrine
  • Warrior memorial
  • View from the New Takanawa Prince Hotel
  • Gateway to Shinto shrine
  • Offerings of sake
  • Tokyo graffiti
  • Modern sculpture adorning roof of classic Japanese beer brewer’s headquarters.
  • Japanese home garden

ENGLAND

I have traveled to the British Isles more than any other place. What is shared here will be some of the photos from trips prior to the most recent visit of 2014, which will be in a separate posting later.

  • Bath
  • Bath 2
  • Pump House, Bath
  • Beaulieu Abbey
  • London
  • York

CANADIAN SCENES

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ASSORTED OTHER IMAGES- ELEMENTAL LINES, SHAPES AND FORMS

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  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • Newtonville
  • Uxbridge 1
  • Uxbridge 2
  • Uxbridge 3

All images in this page are copyrighted C.A. Seaman and may not be reproduced without permission.

Categories
Photography

BLACK & WHITE PHOTOGRAPHY

COLLECTED PIECES FROM THE ARCHIVES: INTRODUCTION

There was a time once when you needed to buy something called ‘film’ for your camera, which itself was something self-contained and not part of that mini-computer that tries to pass itself off as your phone.

Okay… enough sarcasm. The photographs displayed here are ones I took years ago with either a traditional SLR camera, developed using traditional means, or the earliest of digital cameras, using floppy disks or something like them for storage- as far as I can remember. I actually took a course in black and white photography at Durham College in 1998, using darkrooms and enlargers and other tools of the trade that at that time were just beginning to be replaced by digital media. I’m glad I had the experience of that. It taught me the plan the work ahead of time and respect the process of development, knowing each image cost paper, chemicals, time and money. Today, with UNDO functions, Photoshop and the like, students of photography have many safety nets to catch them if they mess up, unless they first forget to hit AUTO SAVE.

With cameras and social media now so prominent in society, I think it can be argued the world and the people within it have never been photographed as much as they are today. And as to the quality of the overwhelming majority of images out there? Well, let’s just say if people had to pay for each one, the internet wouldn’t be choking on the many narcissistic selfies that appear on social media platforms every second of the day. Privacy might not have to be so carefully protected against unwanted recording in someone’s random imagery.

Photography was once a novelty. It was an event when the camera was taken from its case. Now, it is almost a substitute for vision and memory as we know it. People don’t watch concerts. They film them. People barely savour the moment of meeting a celebrity. They reach for their phones to let the device record the memory of that moment for them instead. It goes on…

You didn’t click on this page to read rants, though, and I won’t take up any more time on this rant because I could really go on and on….

BLACK ANGEL OF PETERBOROUGH

This cemetery just on the outskirts of Peterborough featured many interesting memorials, but I must admit I feel in love with this statue of an angel sitting atop the grave of a former Lieutenant-Governor’s son. It is at least life-size, and looked fantastic from any angle. I believe these may have been in colour originally and shot with an early digital camera.

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COBOURG AND PORT HOPE

These two old towns have some interesting cemeteries of their own, with a couple of pieces that stood out from the rest. In Cobourg, it was the strange structure that sat all tipsy on the side of a hill, overgrown with vines and looking something like a beached stone TITANIC. In Port Hope, it was another angel, and…CREEPY!…a grave marker with my family name on it and no dates… These pictures were taken at roughly the same time as the Peterborough set.

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TYRONE MILL SERIES

Tyrone Mill is located just north of where I live, and is still an operational saw mill and cider refinery. It has stood since the mid 1800s, and is a dream photo location site. Inside the mill, wood is stacked ready for cutting. Tools used when my great grandfather was alive line shelves around the shop. On the lower level, you can buy cider and donuts made on site. Outside the mill, you can walk around a lake, or along the river created from its runoff. Then there are all the other little touches, as seen in this gallery.

I hear it has changed a lot since these pictures were taken. In that case, the images here represent an historic record of days gone by. While uploading this set, I found the original colour digital files of these images. I’m happy to still have them, but they look much better in black and white.

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PARKWOOD SERIES

The following are photos taken by me recently at Parkwood Estate in Oshawa, the former home of R.S. McLaughlin and his family. For those you who don’t know who he was, he helped create General Motors, and his philanthropic ways helped create many other venerable institutions in Oshawa and around Ontario. I took these pictures in colour, but converted them to black and white in order to catch more of the period in which this grand building and its grounds were created, between 1915-17.

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OSHAWA UNION CEMETERY

I have lived in the Durham area for 14 years, and yet only just vistied this old and very interesting place of rest on the corner of Highway 2 and Thornton. Here are some of the images I captured there. I have played a little with the settings, to bring out the detail in the stone.

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GHOST ROAD SERIES

Ghost Road was the name of a band in Oshawa, playing a selection of original and cover tunes with a country rock theme. I was invited to become a photographer with the band in 1999, and then followed like a roadie on the trail with them as they played some of their gigs. I felt like an older version of the kid in ALMOST FAMOUS. (Somehow I missed Kate Hudson along the way…) This gallery contains images of the mysterious Ghost Road itself, just outside Port Perry in Ontario.

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ASSORTED OTHER VIEWS

These are assorted other images from the archives. Some may be recognizable to you in terms of locations. Others may be more abstract in their composition and not meant to be part of anything representational or narrative in context.

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All images are copyrighted C.A. Seaman from the time shown on the identification and may not be reproduced without permission.

Categories
Fine Arts

AVIATION ART

I first became interested in aviation and naval art in high school, and still have some of the pieces I did then in my old portfolio. What is shown here is a collection of pieces done since 1990. Many are in private collections now and are not shown in public any more.

Let’s start with the Bristol Monoplane…

This piece was supposed to appear in an art show in 2012, but being the only black and white work, stood out as such an oddity that I left it home when it was time to hang the exhibition. Featuring the graceful and little known Bristol Monoplane of the Great War, it is a tribute to an aircraft that was ahead of its time and unfairly maligned by the powers in charge of the RFC during the war. Serving largely in the Middle East, it performed well and examples of it survived years after the fighting stopped in 1918.

BRISTOL MONOPLANE. Graphite on paper, 14x11in. Copyright C.A. Seaman, 2012

“REMEMBERING THE WAR IN THE AIR”- an exhibition in 2012

2012 was the year when aviation art returned in force to the studio. An invitation in early July to participate in a book talk at the Brampton Public Library on CANADA AT WAR, by Paul Keery, was based on the assumption that I would simply put old pieces lying around the house on display. However, the organizer of the book talk became concerned when I told her many of those pieces went into private collections and in some cases, were unaccountable in their whereabouts because the owners had moved, passed on the work or died. I proposed instead of hunting them down to create new works more reflective of my current style, rather than that of the 1990s when most of the original pieces were created. What follows is a catalogue of new works done in four months on a variety of British and Canadian subjects. For BOMBS GONE OVER BRUNSWICK, where the original is now in England and the process of its completion is documented below, I included a print of the image produced from photos I took of it before it left for its new home.

What also follows after that is an assortment of other pieces completed in a variety of media over the years leading up to the 2011-12 show. Where possible, I will include further information about those pieces, their composition and completion dates.

DEATH AT DUSK. Coloured pencil and watercolour media16x12in. Copyright C.A. Seaman, 2012.

COUNTERMEASURES- Electronic Warfare B-17 in Action. Coloured pencil and watercolour media, 16x12in. Copyright C.A. Seaman, 2012.

HALIFAX FORMATION. Coloured pencil and watercolour media, 16x12in. Copyright C.A. Seaman, 2012.

CANADIAN OVER COLOMBO. Coloured pencil and watercolour mixed media, 14x11in. Copyright C.A. Seaman, 2012.

CHARGING MUSTANGS- 442 SQUADRON LIBERATES THE CHANNEL ISLANDS. Coloured pencil and watercolour mixed media, 14x11in. Copyright C.A. Seaman, 2012.

TIP AND RUN- BOUNCING A BUZZ BOMB. Coloured pencil and watercolour mixed media, 16x12in. Copyright C.A. Seaman, 2012.

CLOSING THE GAP- TYPHOONS OVER FALAISE IN 1944. Coloured pencil and watercolour on paper, 14x11in. Copyright C.A. Seaman, 2012.

REAPING WHIRLWINDS- HUNTING E-BOATS IN THE CHANNEL. Coloured pencil and watercolour mixed media on paper, 14x11in. Copyright C.A. Seaman, 2012.

BOMBS GONE OVER BRUNSWICK- process to completion

In late 2010, I was invited to create an image of a Lancaster bomber for my aunt and uncle’s 50th wedding anniversary. The way in which the aircraft was created was left up to me. Not having completed a large scale aircraft piece in six years, I elected to use coloured pencil for my medium on 140lb. watercolour paper stock. Research took place early in March, after I had already decided on a composition. Admittedly, this was an odd way to compose the piece, but once I sorted out the aircraft, using Touchwood’s Lancaster computer generated model in Poser and my own photo reference material for the background, I hunted through books and the internet until I read of an account of a Lancaster in trouble while on a raid over Brunswick sometime in 1944. Satisfied the account matched the composition, I transferred the squadron codes to the aircraft- already drawn out on the board- to create the first stage of the work shown below, as completed on a Friday. Next, I washed in a kind of underpainting using watered down acrylics to establish a tone range for the background. Yes, it was messy and the paper wrinkled badly at this stage. I was not bothered, however. The coloured pencils- Prismacolour, to be precise- were to be used next, and the sheer pressure of the waxy ‘lead’ on the paper would be enough to flatten the image and shatter more than a few pencils in the process. Detailed images follow the process as the picture progressed.

The final piece, completed the following Thursday after some 22 hours in total, looked like this…

BOMBS GONE OVER BRUNSWICK. Coloured pencil and watercolour mixed media on paper. 20x14in. Copyright C.A. Seaman, 2011. (In private collection)

Some detail studies…

…and other aircraft, too!

LATE MODEL SPITFIRE. Coloured pencil and watercolour mixed media on paper. Copyright C.A. Seaman, 1999. (In private collection)

DeHAVILLAND DH 106 COMET AIRLINER. Coloured pencil and graphite on paper. 30x22in. Copyright C.A. Seaman, 2004.

HANDLEY-PAGE HALIFAX OF NO.87 SQUADRON, R.A.F. Aircraft flown by Len Broadhurst, who I had the pleasure of meeting many years ago, and who received the original of this work. Coloured pencil and watercolour mixed media on paper. Dimensions unknown. Copyright C.A. Seaman, originally 1998. (Posted 1999).

NOTE: Mr. Broadhurst passed away a few years ago. If anyone knows what happened to this piece, please contact me through this website.

Categories
Writings

HOW TO USE COMICS IN THE CLASSROOM

By C.A. Seaman

(This essay reflects a practical academic application for some of the techniques and work I have developed in recent years. Feel free to read and use it. However, if you are to use it, be sure to give me credit.)

APPLICATION TO ESL

How can ESL benefit from the use of sequential art in the classroom? Historically, sequential art has already been used to help people learn the language better. Dry comics showing characters learning numbers, key words, concepts and other communication skills are present in many ESL guides. Indeed, those of us who have taken French as a Second Language at a young age will not soon forget the adventures of Jacques, Suzette and Pitou, the dog (the Francophone equivalent to Dick and Jane). However, beyond the basic function they possess in helping familiarize new learners with the language, there is little in the current material which exists that can capture the imagination of an immigrant audience in this language, and encourage it to read on in English as much for the enjoyment of reading a good story as for the obvious learning benefits it has. If immigrants are continuing to read, it is often in media printed in their own language.

What follows are some ideas on how to use existing comics, or photos to help improve literacy in the ESL learners we teach. You need not be an artist to understand these concepts.

SUGGESTED INSTRUCTIONAL STRATEGIES

Existing comics can provide a useful basis for teaching beginning language for the ESL learner. The sources are readily available in the daily newspaper. The instructor needs only to clip out strips with appropriate material and clearly defined images that are neutral in terms of controversial content, and photocopy them, (giving credit to the creative source, of course!), for the class. The use of a good photocopier is key to this process, as blurred, smudged images with poorly copied text will not work for the students. If size matters for the instructor, enlarge the strip to fill a larger piece of paper. If colour copies are available, the teacher could use them. However, many of the best comics or manga in the world is printed in black and white. Stylistically, as well in the sense of reproduction, this is a lot easier to work with, providing clearer images and less visual clutter for the reader.

What the teacher does with the strips as tools is up to that person, and what they are trying to accomplish in the class. Three possible uses for the completed comic strip are identified below:

1) Simple reader’s comprehension. Students read the strip and develop better language skills from the experience.The instructor may opt to replace text that is hard to understand or conceptually abstract with language of their own in the speech bubbles. However, remember that the material is someone else’s and copyright concerns may exist. Students can be evaluated on pronunciation, clarity of voice, inflection and knowledge of body language, expressions and basic content. Being visual, comics can teach a lot of communication skills to students simply through the way characters on the page are drawn. Many books on how to draw comics contain reference sheets on how faces that are happy, sad, frightened, or exhibit other emotions look on paper. Some of this material could be used to help educate students on the visual language of sequential art.

2) There is also the possibility that the teacher may want the students to interact more with the text of the comics. In that case, the speech bubble content may be erased and the students could be encouraged to place their own text inside. Whether the students complete this task alone or in groups is the choice of the instructor, considering the abilities of the pupils. Students could be evaluated according to appropriateness of dialogue, based on visual cues such as the action taking place, the body language or facial expressions of the characters portrayed.

3)The third strategy employing existing comics could be to take frames from strips which are familiar to students and chop them up, leaving the students to re-arrange them and develop a narrative of their own. This can also be done using magazine photos and other visual media, creating a kind of storyboard project, where images are described in short sentences or paragraphs by the students in the order in which they are arranged. This can be the most interesting of the assignments as the skills applied in this project are varied from art based to literacy based. The students could finish the project with an oral presentation, honing their skills as orators in front of their peers.

4) Students could also take existing strips, if the skill levels are not up to creating an entirely new narrative, and simply continue the story, or, if the last frame is removed, create an ending of their own.

5) Finally, take images from magazines, and lay them out for students. Using the images of their choice, they can arrange them in some order of their own and write a sentence of descriptive text to go with each. They could be encouraged to figure out some kind of narrative to go with the images and tell a story with them using three or four select pictures.

All text is copyrighted C.A. Seaman 2007, and may not be reproduced without written permission from the author/artist.

Categories
About Me

My Story So Far…

Since I was old enough to hold a pencil, I have created art. Since I was old enough to read and write, I have written stories. As I write this, I have no interest in stopping in either of my pursuits.

I was born and raised in Brampton, Ontario. after graduating from high school, I attended studies at the University of Toronto, obtaining both a Bachelor’s Degree in English and History, with a Minor in Sociology and shortly afterwards, a Masters Degree in Modern Military History and Anglo-American relations. From there, I worked with the Brampton Public Library as a Library Technician and then returned to the University of Toronto to complete a B.Ed and then become an employee of the Durham District School Board, where I worked for 29 years.

Arts Education- teaching and learning…

Once in the classroom, I shifted my teaching interests from English and History to Visual Arts and Media. To support this change in direction, I upgraded my skills through taking courses in Photography and Multimedia at Durham College, and in taking a computer course at the International Academy of Design in Toronto. A few years ago, I completed a program in Cartooning and Graphic Novel design at George Brown College and enjoy keeping up with my studies whenever time for travel and work allow me to do so. Coincidentally, I also taught art both privately, and in places like Curry’s Art, the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, and Comic Book Addiction and have been a guest artist at CBA’s Free Comics Day events for several years .

Notices…

In 1997, I received a Civic Arts Achievement award from the City of Brampton, for work I had displayed across the country at places like the National Aviation Museum in Ottawa, the Durham District School Board offices, the Granite Club, the Brampton Public Library, and the offices at the City of Brampton. I acted as a photographer for a band called “Ghost Road”, won an honourable mention in an international postcard art show, and had work published in an alphabet book published by Visual Arts Brampton. My artwork, ranging from landscapes to historical aviation themes hangs in the homes of collectors in Canada and the United Kingdom. Currently, I am a member of Big Art Buzz, an online arts collective that has exhibited in various locations across the Greater Toronto Area.

Projects…

In 1999, I created the Rocket Girls, later known as the Kaiten Angels, as part of a Millennium project hosted by Visual Arts Brampton. The first piece appeared in an alphabet book published by V.A.B., created from a drawing scanned in Photopaint and coloured using that software. Over the years that followed, more images were created, along with story outlines, a short story- never published- and several calendars given to friends and associates. The characters became more computer generated, with less drawing involved up until the release of the last calendar in 2007. After that, I began work on my current project, called SARGASSO. Three books will have been published in the series by Christmas 2010, with the fourth on the way soon after. The story and art are both created by me and the books may be purchased at www.blurb.com. you can also read separate postings on the book and view some of the art related to it by searching this website.

From George Brown to Zephyr Crow and MANNA

I finished work on the first story arc for SARGASSO at the time I began my studies in Cartooning, the Graphic Novel and related illustration or anatomical courses at George Brown College in Toronto. In the Graphic Novel course, we were asked to create a short story of several pages for the final assignment. I had already done some work on a new story involving a character named Zephyr Crow and set in an old movie studio back lot. I will show you more about that in separate postings. For the final project in the Graphic Novel course, I began to develop MANNA, which is a coming-of-age story set mostly in the Netherlands during the Second World War. At the time of writing, MANNA is, as I call it affectionately, my herd of elephants in the room. Years of research, acquiring models and materials for the story, writing the script and sampling different formats for the book have brought me to the point where I am eager to get on with the production of the piece and other stories that have developed around it. As with the other projects, I will include separate postings on MANNA and the other stories as materials become available. Now retired from my work at the DDSB, I will have plenty of time to develop all of these projects and more.

One thing I enjoyed a lot in the last few years was working on creating animated sequences for AVENUE Q with the Whitby Little Theatre. I got to design the animations, put them together, see how puppets were made and be part of a very special production. Please take the time to read my article on working on the show, included in the section on Design and Commercial Projects. I’d like to explore puppetry more in the future and perhaps use it as a way of telling my stories. I’d like to explore the different types of puppets and the ways in which they are made. Puppetry is practically as old as theatre itself, with a long and rich tradition. Some say it is a dying art. I wonder, though. Can it not perhaps re-imagine itself for the new century? Like thinking of the next project and where it will take me in the future, who knows?

Thanks for taking the time to read this article.

Christopher Seaman, 2020