PhD sketchbooks: IBG (8/4/20 - 28/7/20)

I filled much of this sketchbook with work relating to Disorder. (Timelapse video here!)

Still wondering about visual languages (drawing styles) that are visibly different to what I use in my usual illustrative practice. This exploration of paper cutting ended up informing the visual language I assigned to the boys. 

Then trying out ideas for Charley's visual language. I wanted to use anthropomorphism (which became the Wolf) as a way of showing that this stuff is imagined, much like in A4BB. 

Please excuse the sellotape, the book is a glue-bound horror that likes to shed pages

I also used this book to analyse experiments I made in other sketchbooks. This spread shows a test image for Charley in Disorder, and one of the church windows at the end of A4BB.

I wondered about doing Bridget's images as if viewed through windows - the window itself would act as a frame, and would be much more defined, whereas the action behind it would be very hard to see. I wanted to communicate that Bridget's stories are obscured, that we are outside and can't get in, and a sense that there's something more to her stories that we can't access. 

If I'd used it, this visual language could've ended up as a big metaphor about the viewpoint of the historian - we can never get at the stories we want to tell, and we're always viewing stuff through other things. However, I didn't want to suggest the traditional nonsense ideal of the objective, distanced historian. I don't believe that we can be objective and totally disinterested - we've got to have some engagement with the stories we want to tell or we'd never actually do anything!

Left hand page: considering how Mary Ann's visual language could become more unstable (which ended up in the final comic). Right hand page: emergence of what I described as the "ridiculous ship metaphor" - which also ended up in the final comic. 

Left: considering more stuff for Bridget's visual language. Right: started reading Alun Munslow's Deconstructing History (Routledge, London, 1997) resulting in some very fun realisations about historians linking aspects of themselves to the ways in which they interpret traces of the past, especially with regard to me and how I relate to William, we are both short skinny weird blokes - or "somewhat peculiar" in his case - who wear a lot of black (and have mental disturbances)

Still reading Munslow. The comic is about letting the evidence "speak for itself"; a version of it ended up in my thesis. 

This began with thinking about characters and how they relate to/ interact with place/ space (including household objects such as that plaque) and then spinning off into metaphor, such as Charley turning into a giant wolf, William as a scarecrow, and Mary Ann in a house that falls apart around her.

Working out narrative order in (what was then called) Despaired Of. (I later renamed it Disorder.)

Lower right hand page: list of symbols in the frame on p.2 of the comic, including some planetary, some ancient Egyptian, and some that link to other parts of the comic. 

After much wrangling with the arrangement of the panels on p.2, I made a small draft version of it. Also a bunch of ideas for that panel where William's face cracks open.

Character development ideas for Charley's visual language.

The scene of Bridget and Mary Ann mourning over William's grave made it into the final comic.

Tests for Bridget's visual language. I framed her nautical pages with scenes of her at home, looking at some maritime-themed plates, before recontextualising her (imagined) viewpoint to the sea, turning the Academy into a ship and Bridget herself into a mermaid (all done to show that this stuff is imaginary)

Wondering whose viewpoint to do for the next page of the comic, with ideas about the boys' silhouettes, trying to include the plaque in everybody's visual languages, and making the boys' pages into a conversation between a few of them. 

A more developed version of the right-hand page ended up in the final comic. See the final illustration in A4BC.

Left hand page: wondering what the boys see of William (how often is he in the schoolroom? What does he do there?); Charley the shark didn't get used (the Wolf is worrisome enough without the dangerous wild beast metaphor bleeding into Bridget's visual language). Right hand page: analysing the Mermaid and the Captain page. 

An idea that got ditched: William meets a younger version of himself. Some of these bits went on to inform how I did the page where Jane appears, such as the use of typography.

Since William's visual language is close to how I usually draw, I thought about basing Younger William on my old drawings from when I was about seven (see one on the second image in this Instagram post). I abandoned this idea because some viewers might understand it as me projecting myself onto him too much.

Trying to emphasise that the Wolf is part of Charley's imagination. (This is all pure speculation - I have no idea what was going on in the heads of anybody involved in my case study - and, even if we could go back and ask them, would they tell us anything approaching whatever 'truth' is? Would they think we'd want to hear a specific narrative, and give us that? Or would they be contrary and give us a narrative they'd imagine we wouldn't want? Or would they think "Who are you and what are you wearing" and refuse to speak to us? I could go on all day)

Left hand page: planning how to combine three visual languages (William, Charley, and Mary Ann) on one page; in the final publication, only two pages (expect p.2) contain more than one visual language, and they both involve Mary Ann and Charley. Right hand page: two different versions of characters depicted at the same time, and wondering about involving the cholera ghost version of Charley

Left: considering William, vulnerability, responsibility, agency, how different ways of depicting him could affect audience's opinions of him, etc. Right: William questioning his ability to look after the people in his care 

Trying different arrangements for that one panel on p.8 of the final comic, trying to convey an idealised view of the Shaw family c.1821

Somewhere in the middle of this sketchbook, I drew some ultra-hot historiographical material! I was reading Munslow's Deconstructing History and it set my head on fire (which is a metaphor I use to mean only good things, like how William Blake drew people on fire and linked it to the Imagination) so I cranked out six pages of comics and analysis over a few days. (These pages later proved very useful and I go over them a bit more in my thesis)

On p.61 of Deconstructing History, Munslow says that realist novels, like history writing, "appear objective because they ... have suppressed the signs of the 'I' in their narrative" and I thought that drawing (which literally shows the traces made by the creator's hand across the page) could be a decent solution to that. Take it further: include the historian and case study characters having a chat, breaking the fourth wall, talking to the audience and making the audience realise that this stuff has been made by someone. 

Left: Mary Ann gains access to my silly drawing reference selfies on my laptop because she's in my head so she knows all my passwords; incident with Charley in which, unfortunately, I think I still had the last vestiges of "oh no, as a historian I'm not meant to be biased" lodged somewhere in my head. Right: playing with the idea of when historians think they can get an objective overview of their case study or whatever (does anybody seriously believe this anymore?); then discussion of when different historians propose different interpretations, and the most convincing one wins, and William brings up the voicelessness of the dead in the face of those interpretations.

Left: William upset at how he's been represented by other historians, I offer to help, Charley turns up and points out the fabricated nature of the whole venture. Right: analysing the previous page - I only did that comic because I thought it would be a funny joke but then it got out of hand and ended up having Serious Historiographical Implications the more you think about it

Ok! That is Investigation Book G. Click here to return to the sketchbook list/ index.