PhD sketchbooks: IBN (23/3/22 - 26/4/22), IBO (28/4/22 - 10/7/22), and IBP (10/7/22 - ongoing)

Investigation Book N (23/3/22 - 26/4/22) is filled with final illustrations for (U)KA! 

(Timelapse video of all three sketchbooks here!)

I drew the cards twice the size than they'll be printed. A lot of them are surrounded by extra notes (drawing is a way of thinking; by drawing these cards and associated sketches, I could have an explore other ideas)

Left: if I hadn't drawn that courtroom scene, I wouldn't have been thinking about it, and I remembered that Henry Benning, the local apothecary and surgeon who helped treat ill boys (and William) at Bowes Academy, had to accompany William and pals down to London in order to give evidence in the ophthalmia trials - that's, like, 248.5 miles away - nobody better get ill!

Right: one of the split cards, with two images on one card. 

Right: the Fool which is me with some costume reference to Joseph Grimaldi (the famous clown, contemporary with my case study) and some other clowns. Preliminary sketch version available in SBD

Left: the Perception (who turns up briefly in SBF) and who is from a project that I have not yet done because it's still in very early poking-the-ideas-around stages. Right: drawing the death of Mr Dixon and shock realisation! I'm drawing a bunch of cards about William's (Un)Known Associates, and I'm focussing on characters that I (think I) know more about. I probably wouldn't have realised that I was ignoring a load of people if I hadn't been drawing them! (Or intending on drawing them, but actually drawing different characters.)

Left: William upside-down again - while I was drawing this, I realised that the things that made him notorious (the ophthalmia trials and the publication of Nicholas Nickleby) are the main reasons why we know about him and why he is remembered.

Left: I found a brief mention in the Newcastle Courant (29 November 1828) about a road traffic collision that William and Bridget were involved in (at least, I'm presuming it's them! I've tried the parish register but I dunno if there were any other Shaws in the area) - it said, in full, “On Wednesday night, the 19th inst., as Mr and Mrs Shaw, of Bowes, near Barnard Castle, were returning home, a farmer’s cart ran against them, and upset the gig, and broke the springs and arms of the gig. Fortunately Mr and Mrs Shaw did not receive much personal hurt. The driver made his escape, and has not yet been discovered.” and I haven't yet seen it in any other Yorkshire schools historiography. Where had they been in Barnard Castle? What had they done, and who had they seen? Perhaps we'll never know! And that is nothing to be afraid of!

I did these two the day before another operation (I had two during the course of my PhD) - this one wasn't the appendix, it was something I'd needed doing for a long time - but the Star is about optimism and freedom and fortitude, and Death is about the end of one phase and the beginning of another.

Investigation Book O (28/4/22 - 10/7/22) also contains some (U)KA finals! But then it also contains a load of thesis stuff.

(U)KA workings-out, including a list of cards I'd drawn, how to arrange them on an A4 sheet for printing, characters that didn't appear in the cards (will have to use them in (U)KA2), how to arrange the cast list in the PDF, ideas on Jacob Metcalfe, and some other bits

More (U)KA workings-out. 

Thesis drawings! Freehand, like the vast majority of the rest of my sketchbook drawings. Comparatively few across my entire corpus of PhD work have preliminary pencil lines before I add the ink. I wanted my thesis to vaguely resemble a sketchbook, so this freehand type of drawing is going in.

Some of these stayed in the thesis (such as the ones on the left-hand page about how history is not done compared to how you make your own representations and interpretations and that).

Left: entertaining metaphor about using traces of the past, etc., to bring the dead back (which I can't do because they are dead and I can only make interpretations of them). Right: this one stayed in the thesis; despite liking the roughness of these freehand drawings, I edited out the extra lines around Wackford's legs and William's shoulders in Affinity Photo.

More thesis drawings. Sometimes I joke that I am a terrible 19th century father to my thesis; some of those comics ended up in the thesis itself.

Investigation Book P (10/7/22 - ongoing) is mostly thesis stuff. 

Left: ideas for physical artefacts tying in with Charley's visual language in Disorder. Right: some drawing about subjectivity (based on a rant from SBF) that didn't make it into the thesis

Potential cover designs for (U)KA

Thinking about modifying Bridget's characterisation (bit late in the game? POSTDOCTORAL HERE WE COME)

The triangle diagram ended up in the thesis. The two panels underneath it did, too, but the right-hand page didn't, as I thought it was spinning away from a topic I wanted to stay on.

More ideas towards drawings for the thesis, this time about using my own body as reference for William (which I am sure some more traditionally-minded historians would sniff at with great contempt)

Reworked historical sublime diagram

More final thesis drawings

And that is it for the Investigation Books! (Back to the sketchbook index here.)

PhD sketchbooks: SBF (24/4/21 - 9/10/22)

Small but chunky - this one originally had a nasty plasticky cover, which I pulled off and replaced with boards that were slightly too small. The spine nearly came off and I had reattach it with paper tape but it's otherwise doing alright. It got me back into doing (bad) bookbinding! (I made the next two SB sketchbooks.)

Timelapse video of this one here!

Drawing about the passage of time

Left page: things redrawn from Bad Form - that's the (rather awful) graphic novel I did for my final major project at undergrad, and it was about the experiences of a fictional boy at Bowes Academy, and featured some of the same characters (but they were quite different then). Right page: William having a Sad Time

Preliminary work for one of the more striking images in the conclusion of Disorder. Final version in A4BE.

Then some character design work for (Un)Known Associates

Markmaking experiments with a very short pencil - satisfying to make, not quite satisfying once you're done with them - surrounded by written rants about the historical sublime, not needing certainty, meaning being projected onto things by the observer, etc.

A lot of stuff in here is scrabbling around for a visual language for (U)KA. And then it happened.

Bottom of left-hand page: "FEELING STUCK IN MY WORK like the drawings aren't really going anywhere and are just doing the SAME STUFF over and over again FFS which means it is time to experiment again TIME TO LOOK AT WOODCUTS"

I found this book and was much delighted

Tarot references sneaking in (Mr Gairdner has a sword, a disk, a cup, and a wand on his floor today)

Then sometimes I was greatly vexed about things

Vexed at historiography

Vexed at third-person writing/ "objective" viewpoints

Vexed at disembodiment

Vexed at the use of passive voice in academic writing

Vexed and gleeful and also a clown

Then I started looking at W. G. Sebald to see if he had any potential strategies I could borrow - seeing how he constructs narratives and joins things together. (I've only read The Rings of Saturn and Vertigo and I mostly enjoyed them but there was a lot of melancholy and one or two unpleasant book hangovers, you know when you stop reading but you're still in the book and everything you encounter is viewed through that book)

Sebald included images smack in the middle of paragraphs which I think is brilliant (and I do it in my thesis) - this challenges how you read (do you look at the image first, do you jump over the image and finish reading the paragraph first, do you pause word-reading in the middle of the sentence and read the image)

Sebald also makes strange sideways links between things. He jumps conversationally from one topic to another through weird/ apparently insignificant/ seemingly random connections. Sometimes there'll be hints of the next topic hidden in the one before, then he'll pick up that thread and go elsewhere with it. That's what this spread was about - working out how to do that using images.

An idea for using three separate (U)KA cards to make a single image, which isn't quite a single image because the character is shown in three different contexts. (The original pose is adapted from the end of SBA.)

Also other stuff

Notes on Dada manifestos and Tristan Tzara's writings. While I didn't explicitly use these in (U)KA, I'm probably going to refer to them again for some postdoctoral alarum.

Analysing things in some other sketchbooks. These are from SBD.

Fruits of vexation (good name for a band) - an idea for a comic about the popular perception of historians/ the discipline. A few bits of this turn up in some other sketchbooks. It's gonna be postdoctoral! (I've got to make a list of my postdoctoral project ideas, it'll be as long as any of my limbs)

Then some business with the four classical elements and their associations, which I used in developing (U)KA. 

I decided I needed to focus a bit less on my main four characters (William, Bridget, Ann, and Charley) so I listed a load of people William (probably) knew here. I chose four of this lot and assigned one element to each of them (similar to the whole William/Reason and Charley/Imagination business in A4BB, or Ann/Beauty and Charley/Sublime in SBA.)

Initial ideas, and trying to work out Mrs Young's face.

More Mrs Young. I thought Air would be an appropriate element for her - we know nothing about her, apart from her name appears on William's adverts (I haven't seen her anywhere else yet). Air is about clarity, language, communication, precision, reason, etc., but can sometimes find it hard to express emotion. As one of William's references, she would've (hopefully) been able to communicate with prospective clients and tell them what a good school Bowes Academy is. This could've become a bit tricky post-1823 (when William was the defendant in the ophthalmia trials) but she's still listed on his card of terms c.1831.

Richard Seaton, William's agent (until, for reasons that I do not know, he was replaced by Jacob Metcalfe around late 1833/ early 1834). I associated Seaton with Earth, which is about finance (he's William's agent and had his own business for a while, and went bankrupt a couple of times), material considerations, comfort and provision, practicality and reliability (you want those in an agent), but sometimes tends to stick in the mud. Earth is also linked to some bull symbolism (such as the zodiac sign Taurus and St Luke when involved in the four evangelists/ tetramorph situation) and I think it was bovine products that Seaton sold. I wanted to draw him as strong as an ox!

I associated Frank Addison with Water - which is about emotions, relationships (he married Bridget's sister Mally, so he's brother-in-law to Bridget and William, and he and William turn up in documents about trying to start a Methodist chapel in Bowes), methodical (he's a tailor), regeneration, cleansing, but sometimes lacks direction (I don't think the chapel got too far, but I don't know what happened there, but I wouldn't be surprised if it involved one gentleman's mismanagement of his school, health and safety William, cough cough 👀)

Workings-out while I was doing the final artwork for the cards (in other sketchbooks)

Interspersed with the occasional vex

By looking at the cards I'd drawn, I realised I'd missed out a load of people - including the other ushers (assistant teachers) at Bowes Academy! 

Left: thesis layout notes. Right: another rant

Rant from previous image continues. Main theme of this rant is that a representation of a thing is not the thing itself.

And this sketchbook ended with a load of ideas for making 3D objects. Some of them link to some of the imagery and visual languages in Disorder. 

Alrighty, that's it for SBF. Head back to the sketchbook index for another!