This is an old sketch I made in Oakland, CA while leaning on the back of my car waiting for a friend to join me for coffee. Unfortunately, she arrived before I could quite get it finished. I’m hoping I can expand on it to make it into a full fledged painting. Somewhere I have a couple photos I shot later in the same spot that I can use for reference if I can locate them. We’ll see how this one germinates…
Preliminary sketch
Pulcinella (aka Punchinello) was a comic character from the Comedia dell’arte theatre of Italy (think Punch and Judy,) and charivari was an ancient folk custom of making a noisy racket to scare away evil spirits. In 1841 a newspaper magazine was passed through London called “Punch, Or The London Charivari,” no doubt with the intention of lifting the spirits of its readers. Its namesake, the beak-nosed Mr. Punch, was used as their icon of satirical irreverence. The interior pages would be filled with articles and drawings of satire and humor. Other versions of Punch sprang up around the world (Germany, China, and elsewhere) to capitalize on its popularity. The original had many publishing rivals, but none lasted as long. The London publication ran for over 150 years*, an amazing feat. It briefly reappeared in a different format, and ten years later closed for good in 2002.
Punch laid the groundwork for the editorial and gag cartoon panels that we still see today. The early editions contained art by Charles Keene, John Tenniel, and Ernest (Winnie the Pooh) Shepard. Later editions contained great drawings by other artists such as Bernard Partridge, Linley Sambourne, F.H. Townsend, or those marvelous horses by Denholm Armour.
There are book collections available, but they are rare now and out of print; however, Google Books has generously scanned several of the older copies and placed them online (that’s where the images below come from.) If you are at all fond of excellent ink drawing I strongly encourage you to give them a look. Hopefully, what goes around comes around and soon we’ll see a reemergence of this kind of work in the years to come.
Denholm Armour
Bernard Partridge
Linley Sambourne
John Tenniel
*Note: Officially I’ve read the first publication was 1841, but have seen a collected issue that claims to go back as far as 1837.
Vilmos Andreas (i.e. Willy Andrew) Pogány was a Hungarian born (1883) artist who immigrated to America in 1914 and his art career was expansive. He designed stage sets and costumes for the Metropolitan Opera, worked as a Hollywood art director in the 30s, designed hotel interiors, illustrated magazines covers, and became especially well known illustrating classic books from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” to “Mother Goose.” In the last years of his life he worked as a portraitist and died in 1955.
Early in his career he illustrated a series of books by the Irish author Pádraic Colum. He was a playwright and poet who also came to America in 1914 and was a couple years older than Pogany. He later lived in France and was close friends with James Joyce, helping him with “Finnegan’s Wake.”
I don’t have information on just how Colum and Pogány got together, but it seems likely that they were close, since they had similar interests and background. The five Colum books illustrated by Pogány were of mythological subjects designed for a children’s library. The drawing style Pogány chose for many of these is black and white line art reminiscent of ancient Greek vase painting, but “The King of Ireland’s Son,” (as in the first insert above) has a more traditionally illustrated look. I have not yet found a copy of “The Frenzied Prince,” which I believe happens to be the last book he ever illustrated, published about 20 years after the other four. Colum’s writing style is quite entertaining, and his research on the myths themselves seems quite thorough and accurate.
Several of the Colum Pogany books are available for free on the net, some as PDF downloads with good quality scans of the art. You can find them at Google Books. I recommend them highly, for the writing and the art. There are also other books illustrated by Pogány there, such as “Faust.”
Pogány also wrote three art books called “Drawing Lessons” (a.k.a. The Art of Drawing,) “Oil Lessons,” and “Watercolor Lessons,” and while the information in the books doesn’t impress me as much as others on these subjects, the artwork is very nice.
Colum & Pogány books:
The King of Ireland’s Son
The Children’s Homer: The Adventures of Odysseus and the Tale of Troy
The Children of Odin: A Book of Northern Myths
The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles
The Frenzied Prince, Being Heroic Stories of Ancient Ireland
More:
about Willy Pogány
about Pádraic Colum
List of illustrated books by Pogány
List of books written by Colum
Nice scans of Pogány art at Golden Comic Book Stories
Pogány art at Nocloo.com – search “pogany” to find more art there
This will be off-topic from the usual art subject matter, but will still be useful to computers users, including artists. Unlike basic backups of files, in order to make a copy of your PC operating system you have to create a clone of that drive when the system files are not running. You can’t just drag and drop the operating system files. The way I do this is to boot from my CD drive and run the clone software from there.
The reason you really want to have a backup of your system disk is to avoid having to reinstall everything from scratch, including all the security upgrades and all your previously installed software, should you have a disk failure on your booting drive. It’s also useful if you’re migrating to a larger drive or to a different machine.
The cloning software I use is Clone MAXX by Convar. They offer a freeware version that works very simply. You’ll also need an internal drive that makes CDs, and software that supports ISO files for making a CD you can boot from. I use MagicISO, but most CD making software supports ISO files.
I just went through this operation last night, and I try to remember to do it regularly every one or two months. My current PC has an 80GB boot drive and a second 160GB drive attached. To perform this clone backup, I shutdown the system and replace the second drive with another 80GB drive. I have to use an internal drive for this setup since an external USB drive wouldn’t be recognized by the booting CD. I power up the system with the Clone MAXX CD which displays a simple DOS screen that reads the system configuration and asks me what drives to use as the source and clone. My current boot drive uses a little less than 20GB, and the clone process took under an hour to duplicate. When it’s complete I shutdown and temporarily replace the original boot drive with the clone as the master drive, and then boot up again to see that everything comes up properly. I can also use this setup to clone the other drive as long as the backup drive has enough capacity.
I noticed old files in a separate partition on the clone disk were erased, so if your clone drive is partitioned move them off there before cloning. I believe if your boot drive is partitioned, any files in those partitions will also be cloned, but my boot drive isn’t partitioned, so I don’t know for sure.
Final painting
I touched up the front deer’s neck, chest, and legs a little, and toned down some of the grass areas. I think I’d better stop on this one now so that I don’t mess it up.
Here’s the latest version of the deer painting. I need to add a bit more modeling to the front deer’s body which I’ll probably do with glazing, as well as a few extra touch ups here and there.
Painting update
Here’s an update on the deer painting. Still have the big boy in the front to finish. That shade of blue in the grass areas is not as saturated as it appears in this photo, but I might still need to go back in and tone it down some. Those leaves above his head might need to be a bit brighter too.
To show that I haven’t completely forgotten my painting duties, here’s a new one that I started a few days ago. It’s based on a scene that I witnessed at a friend’s home several days back as we watched two deer in her back yard. The light of the setting sun gave them a magical appearance which I’m hoping to capture from memory.
Painting in progress
The preliminary layer was painted in various tones of thinned blue acrylic, some of which you can still see here, and the rest is being painted in casein. The foreground grass is still in progress. I’ll be going back to that and adding some long blades of grass, but want to continue the shadow area first and possibly the deer too, adjusting the values at the end. The painting surface is gesso on hardboard, approximately 16 inches square.
Continuing my posts on how to simply reproduce slides and negatives (see earlier post Scanning Black and White Negatives,) I thought I’d be brave enough to show you my awkward rig for using a film camera lens to reproduce a color slide or negative. If you haven’t got a macro lens zoom for your camera, this will allow you to get close enough to the slide to give you a high resolution image. I admit the rig looks rather flimsy here, but it actually works extremely well. You’ll need a screw mount lens (the tele photo works best for me, but a regular lens will too,) a light table, and in this case a couple of cardboard tubes @ 1.75 inches in diameter (these came from rolls of toilet paper.)
Cardboard tube and lens
The focus ring on a screw mount lens won’t operate unless it’s attached to a camera, however, it will allow you to move very close to an object to get it into focus without having to use the ring. Hold one up to your eye and move your other hand close until it comes into focus, and you’ll see what I mean. If you have a lens like these with an old film camera, you can use it with a digital camera to get the slide to fill up the whole frame of the picture. Without a macro lens you won’t be able to fill the frame with the slide image, which reduces the potential resolution. This rig will work with any type of camera.
The first thing you need to do is determine how far from the slide the camera needs to be to get the slide into focus. I place the slide on the light table, hold the lens to my eye, and move forward or back until it comes into focus. A regular lens (such as my 49mm) needs to be about .5 an inch away, and the telephoto (mine is a Sigma Mini-Tele 135mm) is about 7 inches away. I take two pieces of tubing and tape them together at that height. I tape some thick paper sheets around the slide to mask out the light from the table except for the film area, place the lens on the tube and set it over the slide. Now I’m ready to shoot.
Lens placed on tube
I have two digital cameras, one is a 6MP fixed lens, the other a 10MP digital SLR. I actually prefer the 6MP camera in this case since the small lens opening fits on the screw lens opening more easily. I zoom the camera out to its highest optical setting (for this camera that’s a 3X zoom,) hold it steady to the lens on the tube, and take the picture. The flimsy tube is a tight fit to the slide, so an improvement would be a tapered tube that has a slightly wider bottom but still fits the lens at the top. A box that is high enough would also work if I cut an opening for the lens, but for now this will do fine.
Photographed slide example
In the photo above is an example of a slide taken a few years ago in San Francisco. Superimposed in the upper left corner is a shot made with the same camera as close as it allows me to get without this rig, and you can see the difference in sizes (Note: this image is reduced from it’s original size of 2803 x 1990.) The difference is between roughly a 1MP image and a 6MP image. Although most of these fixed lens digital cameras only save in JPG format, including mine, there are some new ones out now that also support RAW and have a larger color sensor for better quality files.
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Artwork by D. B. Clemons 