PhD sketchbooks: A4BB (early 2019 - March 2020)

Different format! Big A4 sketchbook. It's got a friend, A4BC. (Timelapse video of A4BB here!)

Tried dabbling in counterfactuals (a word that I didn't mess with too much, a term that I'm deploying here to mean 'using a heavy dose of imagination in making historical narratives') and wondering how to communicate blatantly imaginary narratives. This is before I had a better understanding of the created/ fictive nature of history, before I'd fully worked out my standpoint as a deconstructionist.

William as a barn owl, and Charley as some kind of dog of mysterious ancestry. Also trying out Bridget in various avian forms.

Bridget as a tawny owl, and Ann as a whippet. Turning these characters into animals raised all kinds of problems - they're married with kids: if I don't want to draw fun hybrids/ abominations then the parents have to be similar species. On the right-hand page, Ned Smith the runaway became a hare, and Charles Dickens became a raven. (Another problem: there's something a bit deterministic if a character is a hare and whoops, he's known for running away but, in this animal-headed universe, he'd have been born as a hare)

The counterfactual bit (ignoring the fact that they're all animals now, but then that communicates that these are not 'true' stories): I wondered what might happen if Bridget and Ann taught girls while their husbands taught boys. I used anthropomorphism to communicate that this isn't backed up by anything obvious in traces of the past. If Bridget had been teaching, William would have probably included something in his adverts about "Mrs Shaw instructs a number of young ladies at the above Academy on very reasonable terms, etc." - but he didn't! I've seen loads of his adverts in The Times (but I know he also advertised in other newspapers that I haven't seen yet), and I haven't seen any other researchers getting excited about anything like this in relation to William and Bridget. 

Then I applied more Blake to William and Charley - William aligned with Reason, and Charley aligned with Imagination. 

Right hand page: briefly swapped them round (William suddenly energetic, Charley suddenly static), and then put them back and used them to respond to Blake.

Started thinking about playing with format, and began working on a writing blank. These things were contemporary with my case study: blank sheets with decorative borders, frequently featuring instructive/ aspirational illustrations, and kids at school would produce a sample of their handwriting in the middle, which was called a schoolpiece. I don't know whether any were used at Bowes Academy. Here's one from 1810 (at the Bodleian) which also has (idealised) scenes of kids at school, even including a very meta one in which a boy shows his schoolpiece to his friends.

Some of the figures around the edges of writing blanks were allegorical, and meant to show virtues (and sometimes vices) that the kids using the sheet should (or should not) emulate. Here's one from 1784 titled 'Emblems for the Improvement of Youth' which depicts things such as Vigilance and Laziness. I used William and Charley's associations with Reason and Imagination to decide what virtues/ traits to depict.

Right hand page shows some definitions from The Improved London Edition of Barclay’s Dictionary, Superbly Embellished, published by J. McGowan, Great Windmill Street, London. c.1812 - definitions such as Reason, Imagination, Empiricism, Tradition, etc. Here's a later edition.

Emblems! Some of the final illustrations for the writing blank. 

Screenshot of the finished writing blank! I need to do a printable version at some point so people can do their own best (or worst!) writing (or drawing!) in the middle and show their friends. (Yes I assembled it in Pages)

Some of the other experiments in this book include...

Trying to communicate emotion without showing characters.

Left hand page: using colour/ media/ mark making to evoke emotions.

Simplification, I think as a means to boiling down the character designs? I think I was trying to make them look less specific? Not the most fruitful experiment. The most interesting thing on this spread is that part of the left-hand page where I'm analysing the shapes I use to build the characters.

Speeding up drawing to simplify them. 

The final illustrations for my recontextualisation of William Blake's poem The School-Boy are in this one! See SBB for preliminary drawings.

See the pages on my Instagram here: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

See one of Blake's original prints of the poem here.

Then some more ink drawings. These are for exploring the visual contrast between how I designed William and Bridget's body shapes. 

These next ones are for a seminar about historiography and illustration that I did in December 2019. Here's the poster (which has an image I did for an essay for a research module) and here's me waving my arms around (thank you to my splendid friend Colin for the photograph!).

Left hand page: random inky William (nothing to do with the seminar) and a trail of traces of the past. Right hand page: don't trust your sources (what or who influenced the testimonies of people at the ophthalmia trials?) and me messing about with a timeline.

The right-hand page is about interrogating your sources. Questioning stuff and imagining how it might've been used.

More things.

Bridget being ephemeral. We don't know much about her! Preliminary work for one of that set of three panels that very few people have actually seen yet, I really need to show them somewhere - Bridget's panel is here, here is William, and here is Charley

Warm-up work for the ink illustrations for a talk I did in March 2020 for my local history society.

Final illustrations for the windows that I planned in IBF. 

That's it for A4BB. This way for the sketchbook list.