This week’s folklore topic is Trees and Forests. As ever, the strip was prompted John Reppion’s tweet length story:

In 1990 work on the Limerick to Galway motorway halted. A lone tree stood in its way. The Hawthorne, according to tradition, belonged to the Sidhe (Ireland’s Fairies). Disturbing such sites is forbidden. A curve was added. The road snaking around the Thorn Tree. #folklorethursday

My original plan on this was to do a moody Frank Miller piece, stark black and white and a dash of red. At least that was my plan until I read John’s tweet (quick backroom secret: we know both the topic’s in advance, and John sends me his tweet in advance).

The moment I read the tweet, I KNEW I was gonna go Arthur Rackham on it.

Arthur Rackham (b.1897-d.1939) was a British book illustrator who did a wonderful line in fairies and trees. He’d often morph the shapes of trees into beautifully gnarled figures too. Fantastic artist, I fell in love with when I first saw his work in my late teens – my dad was/is a collector of antiques/ephemera, and had got hold of an Arthur Rackham illustrated edition of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, no internet in those days, so seeing that, and finding books about him, was the only way to find out anything. Nowdays a quick google search will turn up hundreds of drawings. Kids, eh? dunno they’re born.

Felt fairly confident we’d see a large tree right in the centre of the page. So I started from there. Decided to go with a couple of construction guys on panel one, and the idea that the fairies where playing havoc with the traffic cones suggested itself.

Next step after pencils is inking…

I’d toyed with the idea of drawing a map, to show the road snaking around the tree, but it really was a struggle to make that seem interesting, thought it would be more fun to draw a car driving past the tree, with the passenger completely oblivious to the wonders around them (like everyone with kids, you know they’re sitting in the back on their ipads no matter how loudly you shout “LOOK! MOO MOO!” as you pass a cow)

I left a big gap beside car panel, because it felt like it balanced out the composition. I knew I’d put some text there (and I was still toying with a map)

Colouring

Colouring begins with flatting a page. Basically you add a simple flat colour to all the individual elements of a page – these colours won’t generally be final, in fact sometimes you’re better colouring them with entirely random colours. You’ll use the magic wand tool in clip studio or photoshop to pick up the groups – so, for example, I could select JUST the colour bands of the traffic cones by using the magic wand tool.

At this point I was still thinking of colouring this page as naturally as possibly, but two thinks struck me: firstly, I DID want to do something different with this one, three pages is a pattern and I didn’t particularly want to do patterns and secondly, it just felt like any colour would detract from the big tree. So I decided to make the inset panels pure black and white. Which was a little too stark, so I moved them to greyscale. And I quite like the look.

This is the first time I’ve messed around with the lettering, but introducing the repetition of The Hawthorne seemed like a more natural way to read the text. (When I’m placing the dialogue I’m reading it aloud, I’ve done some acting so I think I’ve a solid ear for how dialogue can be heard).

If you’re interested, you can read more about the tree here.

One final thing, the original black and white pages are drawn at A4, pencilled on one side, inked on the other and they’re available for sale. You can contact me directly if you’re interested.

“John! JOHN! We’ve gotta do another one! Quick! Think of something…”

I’m kind of curious about John (Reppion)’s creative process, I should ask him to do the next blog post – does he have any idea in his head what I’ll draw? Is it a surprise? ( I know the first one was… cus I just drew it without him knowing it was gonna happen) Does he expect me to pick out one detail then I go with another? Anyway, I have no idea. I should do something about it.

This week’s folklore thursday topic is local food. Which prompted John to come up with:

Brambles grow wild across the UK. Their thorny vines bring forth sweet Summer fruit. The berries must never be picked after October 11th. This is when Lucifer fell from Heaven, landing in a blackberry bush. In  revenge he spoiled the fruit by spitting upon them #FolkloreThursday

Went through – what is now – the usual process, splitting it up in to panels as I saw it. Lucifer falling from Heaven was gonna be the big one, big fun old devil to draw. I initially wanted to make Lucifer look half angelic, a sort of glow through the middle of his body but, frankly, at the size I was drawing it, I couldn’t get the detail in I wanted so I dropped it, went straight to the devilish form (it’s one page, you don’t have the space to mess around).

Panel 1 simple establishing show-we’ve gotta be in the UK (I wanted Northhampton, just for funsies, an industrial english town overgrown) but space and lack of familiarity with the place meant all I could do was get a skyline with a big chimney in there.

First three sentences broke down into three simple panels, showing an establishing shot, brambles, industrial town, then a close up of some fruit (and I threw in a nice little bird, for the sake) and the third panel tried to figure out a way to get the date in there, then realised I was torturing myself and I could just literally have a date fly past the panel.) Added the little bird flying away too.

I thought it’d be fun to draw the panels as vines (which is a pretty stupid idea, cus it was hard work) but it really did make it feel like a nice piece.

Split the line “this is when lucifer fell from heaven” and “landing in a blackberry bush” – irresistible to have satan have his bare bottom impaled on a couple of little pricks (er)

Felt I needed a facial reaction after the pricking of his bum (something wicked this comes), and then it came to the “spoiled the fruits by spitting on them” and I pencilled that. In conversation with John it turned out the myth has a few variants, he spat, he pissed and he … well.. let’s say he does something very deeply unpleasant to them that spoils them.

To me spitting on it felt… I dunno, less funny than the devil taking a piss on them, so that’s what I did. I split the line so the “he spoiled the fruit” was rubbing up against the line of urine from satan (it’s almost abstract, and you may not be sure what you’re seeing) then “by urinating on them” is juxtaposed against the image the drawing of satan rubbing his sore butt. It made me laugh. And that’s all I ask.

Like a fool, I coloured the first one, and thought – that’s cool, I’ll do b&w for any more. But no… I ended up colouring this one too.

I had to play with the placement of the letters too, because of those stupid vines I drew for panel borders.

Satan’s reaction to the sting felt like it was missing something, and it was clearly missing a simple line of dialogue. I’d accidentally turned my primary colour to white in Clip Studio, so when I lettered it it was reversed (white text on black) but I liked that so kept it.

By the way, the black and white art for both strips is available to buy, if you’re interested, just fire me off an email!