Learning From The Old Masters Of illustration

This summer I have been experiencing a surge in creativity. You know those ones? An itch that can only be relieved by prolific drawing and painting. And so I had the bright idea of offering an “art summer camp” in which my students and I would study anything at all, from lettering and fonts, to gouache, illustration and anything else that occurred to us. That was the plan at first, but I think that when it comes to creativity you need a plan, some parameters, or you end up staring at a blank sheet of paper.

And so, during an extra class on Wednesdays for the months of May, June and July, I didn’t have much in the way of structure, so the first offerings left a lot to be desired. Since I wasn’t charging anything extra for the classes – they were simply a summer bonus for my Sketch Club members – I felt totally free to express myself, always a good thing.

(Side note: there are lots of websites where you can contribute a piece of art with no pay offered or requested. These are fantastic places to release your creative flow, because there’s no pressure at all. They Draw is a great example.)

After a few false starts, I had a breakthrough. One of my favourite books ever written and drawn is In The Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak. I wondered if I could learn his technique and make an illustration based on his work. I went to his other best-known work, Where The Wild Things Are, and had a closer look.

I saw the black outlines, the googly eyes, the soft palette, the font, and I decided to come up with something of my own. I think I missed the mark in many respects, but doing the illustration unleashed something, and gave me an idea.

What if I took my favourite illustrators (most of whom also wrote the stories they illustrated), had a really close look at their recipes, broke them down, threw them into a soup, gave it a good stir and then tried to make a sandwich? I knew it could only ever be a sandwich rather than a gourmet meal, but I still thought it was worth a try. Have not the artists of yore always learned from the masters? I felt that if I, and by extension my amazingly creative students, were to push the envelope a little, great things could – could – result.

There were doubters! Naysayers! “Illutsration is not for me” they said! But because there was no extra charge for these classes, some dipped their toes in the water anyway. And…surprise surprise, some found the water to be lovely.

So here’s a list of some of the classes we did. There were other, non-picture-book-illustration-themed classes too, but these were by far my favourite.

1. Maurice Sendak

I love this man’s work. I love the progression you can see from his earlier work, and I love how he, in turn, was inspired by Winsor McCay and his Little Nemo books of 1905 – have a look, you’ll be flabbergasted! I love that he was not too proud to stand on the shoulders of giants. I wonder whose shoulders Winsor stood on…and now I am doing the same thing…and on and on it goes.

Here are the elements in a Maurice Sendak drawing:

• Black dip pen
• Muted palette
• Googly yellow eyes
• Teeth all akimbo
• Chunky sans serif font in caps
• Soft background
• Cuddly characters
• Heavy shadows hither and thither
• Title starts with a preposition
• Watercolour

2. Beatrix Potter

By the time I decided to try and channel the great Beatrix Potter, I had the idea of replacing Ribby the pussy cat with Reuben and Duchess the Pomeranian with Babette, my parents’ dog. The story I chose is called The Tale of the Pie and the Patty Pan and it’s a story about social etiquette in the early 20th century (1903). I really love the story and the vibe of a hospitable cat and an over-nervy little dog overthinking and getting everything wrong. Highly recommend, whatever age you are!

Beatrix’s elements:

• Dip pen in dark brown ink
• Delicate lines and colour
• Beatrix Potter palette of pastel colours
• Dogs and cats and everything else doing funny things
• Watercolour
• Beady little eyes

From this illustration onward, I used Reuben the terrier as my muse: the choice of character was not the point of the exercise, so I thought Reuben would be as good a muse as any. I also thought it would be inspiring to the students to insert their beloved pets and / or favourite animals into whatever illustration they wanted to make.

3. Jean de Brunhoff

The Babar books were read to me in a vague sort of way as a child, but I suspect my mother found them as weird as I did. With the wisdom of adulthood I can see that they are indeed weird, but some of the drawings are really gorgeous. In what way are they weird? I think that Babar the huge chunky elephant in a bright green suit and a crown, driving his little car around Africa, is odd enough, but that’s only where it starts. You’ll have to make up your own mind…

Babar illustrations:

• Simple, strong colours
• Watercolour (works well in gouache too)
• “Vintage”, classically French font, in French
• Very limited palette
• Dots for eyes
• Blank expression
• Scalloped frames and vertical stripes
• Black ink

4. Walt Disney

I saw a wall mural for a children’s room featuring multiple Mickey Mouses zooming around in a plane as another Mickey and Minnie wave from the ground. It was beautiful, but I couldn’t find the original cartoon on which it was based – if it was at all. It was really great to get the wrist flowing freely with the brush lines.

Mickey Mouse techniques in the early days:

• Tinted paper
• Gouache
• Oval eyes with a notch taken out at the side
• Black ink
• Brush pen , dip pen or brush
• Flat pastel colours

5. Dr. Seuss

I was enchanted to pore over the wonderful work of Theodore Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss. Such freedom. Could we somehow access that same freedom? We could try. I discovered upon close study that while there is little to no regard for reality or anything realistic, the principles of art remain: weight in a figure, values in the form of cross hatching, shadows. The palette was even more limited than the other illustrators I had looked at heretofore, a function, I discovered, of the limitations of the early books. Sometimes constraints can be a blessing: it probably contributed to the signature limited-palette look of Dr. Seuss’ œuvre. It was most enlightening to see that you can draw what you like, how you like, as long as you don’t mess with the most basic physics of gravity and light. They make an imaginary world believable.

Reuben is quite scribbly anyway, so he worked well as a subject. The lady in lilac is supposed to be me…albeit a pound or two slimmer.

Here are elements in a Dr. Seuss illustration:

• Limited colour palette
• Chunky, expressive black ink lines in fude nib or dip pen
• Cross hatching
• Gouache better than watercolour (I tried both)
• Soft shapes with lots of random scribbling
• Unnatural, fantasy colours
• Simple, strong shapes

6. John Tenniel

This one goes way back – to 1865. John Tenniel didn’t write Alice In Wonderland, of course, but he illustrated the first edition. I loved the freshness and careful draughtsmanship that somehow looks loose at the same time. Reuben stood in for the Hare at the tea party, but I chose not to bring in the Mad Hatter or the Dormouse for time reasons (our classes are only 90 minutes long).

Tenniel’s beautiful work has:

• Cross hatching
• Really soft colours in a limited palette
• Expressive, 19th-century eyes (whatever that means)
• Careful draughtsmanship
• Vintage look
• Fine, black ink lines in a 40º fude nib

7. Richard Scarry

I loved these books as a child, and my mother bought lots for me and my siblings. Reading them now – I bought an entire set of them for my research – I experienced dream-like wafts of fifty-year-old-plus memories being reignited. It was mystical, misty and beautiful.

To interpret Richard Scarry, I set my little scene in Enniskerry (my local village growing up) and drew the Clock Tower in the centre of the village. I used the Scarry style of slightly wonky perspective and flat colours, and I used local Wicklow fauna for the animals. Of course Reuben is jumping up and down in that random Scarry way, and the names are all Irish versions of what I perceive to be Scarry-flavoured characters. The police car – Garda car in Irish parlance – is an actual Garda car from the 1980s…far too delightful a shape to pass up.

For the mini-story I picked up on the “mild peril” that is always taking place in a Richard Scarry spread.

To channel Richard Scarry you might include the following:

• Fine black lines
• Circular eyes with large eyeballs
• Rich colour palette
• Lots of movement
• Labels everywhere

8. Quentin Blake

When I sat down to examine Quentin Blake, I kept hearing the voices and reading the words of many commentators on my work, who say “your work is very like Quentin Blake”. I always try to be polite and say “thank you” but inside I seethe: my work is like Róisín Curé and no one else. But I know they mean well, and they may have a point: when I tried to come up with a drawing based on Blake’s style, I found it was too close to my own to “switch” hats and wear his. Like when you’ve scored a line in paper incorrectly, and it’s too close to the correct line for you to go over it cleanly. Instead, we had a delightfully informal class in which I went through a biography of Blake that my mother bought me (nice but slightly hagiographic in my opinion) and just picked any inspiring illustration I landed upon. For that reason I can’t show our results from class here, because they aren’t “mine” in the way that all the others in the series are mine. But we learned lots about Blake’s loose and free style.

Many years ago I watched a documentary about Quentin Blake. The artist was most generous in the show, describing his process in detail. He talked about the difficulty in retaining the energy of a rough pencil sketch when applied to a finished piece. “I put the drawing on a light box,” he said, “and lay a piece of heavy watercolour paper on top, so that I can barely see the drawing underneath. All I can see is the position of the drawing and the size and general proportions. That way, I am amost making a new drawing, and can keep the energy of the original.”

I wanted to demonstrate that technique to my students, so I made a series of drawings of Reuben (again) as my muse, using a light box and starting with pencil sketches. In the end we didn’t use these drawings i class, because they were too Róisín Curé and not enough Quentin Blake, technique in common or not.

So what did I learn? What did my students learn?

1. That illustration is a lot of fun: many of the resistant students were surprised by how much they enjoyed it.
2. That there are as many ways to draw a character or a scene as there are artists doing that.
3. That we learn through play.

I learned something else, too: that a lot of these illustrators had come from difficult backgrounds and continued to experience difficulties. Jean de Brunhoff died at 37 of TB. After a great many rejections, Beatrix Potter lost her fiancé and first publisher, to anæmia. Dr. Seuss longed to be taken seriously as a fine artist. Walt Disney had his demons (I can’t remember what they were, I just know he had them). Many famous illustrators grew up in extreme poverty / had relatives who escaped the Nazi death camps / suffered illness or depression…making my fifteen years (and counting) of rejection by illustrators’ agents and publishers pale into insignificance.

The Fun Continues

My largesse in offering the classes for no extra charge couldn’t go on indefinitely. I could have just dropped it from the curriculum, but I didn’t want to, nor did many of my students. So, during one of our open chats online, we negotiated: I wanted to ask a fee that would be affordable and accessible to as many students as possible, making a win-win situation for both me and them. In the end we settled on an extra €10 per month for two classes a month: so now you have a choice of one Monday class each week (On Location Sketching in Watercolour) for a €50 monthly subscription, or the Monday class plus two extra Wednesday classes per month (Illustration in Watercolour and Gouache) for €60. I have no idea how popular this will prove to be, but I intend to have lots of fun with those who do sign up in September for both offerings. I want to dive more deeply into the work of Beatrix Poetter, Maurice Sendak and Dr. Seuss, and many, many more.

Reuben’s time in the spotlight is over, because he is tired after all that posing. So I don’t know what we’ll do as themes in the new illustration classes. But I am excited.

See you next time!