PhD sketchbooks: SBC (24/11/19 - 6/2/20)

Slightly different format to most of the others - this one's landscape while the rest are portrait. No real reason apart from I like the novelty of it. (Timelapse video here!)

Trying to depict what William might have been feeling around the time of the trials.

I'd done a presentation the day before I drew the left-hand page, hence Charley's enthusiasm. I drew these while waiting for my flu jab, and I think one of the nurses got turned into Bridget. 

Left hand page: development drawing for Bridget, and I'd read Sarah Winter's The Pleasures of Memory: Learning to Read with Charles Dickens (Fordham University Press, New York, 2011) and apparently people used to teach kids to read using gravestones, so I wondered how the boys might have related to the people they'd read about on the gravestones in the churchyard at Bowes. Right hand page: initial planning for the three panels. I wanted to do portraits of William, Bridget, and Charley, with influence from William Blake's poets - a series of 18 panels his friend William Hayley commissioned him to make for Hayley's library. Here's one of Chaucer.

Trying out ideas for the panels.

More panel stuff. 

I'd recently visited the Tate's William Blake exhibition with my marvellous friend Sam and we had a very excellent time. Here's Bridget with some Blakean poses, looking ephemeral - back on the theme of how we don't know much about her!

There's larger acrylic paint versions of some of these in A4BB.

This sketchbook also contains some of my plans for my talk for CDHAS.

Designing Benning's face. I later used these as reference when I drew him in Disorder. One of these is based on this photograph of his son, but I had to make up his chin a bit due to the younger Mr Benning's rather considerable beard.

Like the vast majority of the people in my case study, I don't know what Mrs Ockerby (the lady on the right) looked like. Sometimes I like to try out a few different versions of a character's face.

Quite often, when developing a character, I'll find that at least one of them bears too close a resemblance to one of the existing characters. One of these preliminary Mrs Ockerbys here has a nose too much like William's nose. Personally, I doubt they were related, but drawings like these make you think "What if they were? And what repercussions might that have?" Or not! Haha who knows

Developing Mrs Ockerby's sons. She and Mr Ockerby, a tobacconist, had four that I'm aware of. 

The judge, Sir James Alan Park, who presided over the ophthalmia trials. Also layout for one of the slides. Here's him in his work clothes. I wish I'd drawn him in that outfit (he is very obviously a judge) but in the final illustration, I gave him the costume worn by the judge in this image of the interior of the Court of Common Pleas. (See p.42 of this for his opinions about a wig.) On a semi-related note, here is something I would love to see - his diaries, which, going by the description, have a very high possibility of containing something about the ophthalmia trials.

This sort of thing continues into SBD. Return to the sketchbook index here.