Graham Higgins - Illustrator

Sunday 20th - Long grind up the M6 and points East. Unfamiliar routes always feel longer. Huge relief to finally locate the improbably remote Cross Farm and be shown to the room I'll be working in and from for four nights. On these projects the evening retreat is part of the work, a place and the opportunity to draw, reflect on the day and prepare for the next.
The basic requirements are a comfortable bed, decent washing facilities,good lighting, kettle, TV. Some hotels have tables big enough to draw on in the room, maybe with a small table-lamp, but
often in rooms with stubbornly subdued light. Often the bed is the drawing desk while you kneel on the floor. So long as I can get into the drawing of an evening, I'm happy. This room is a kneel-on-the-floor deal, but worth texting to say big thanks to Charlotte for finding it.
So Sunday evening, I'm drawing trolls for the story from St.Joseph's. A troll scratches his head, dislodging gravel. Is this just friction or is it troll dandruff? This troll is very angular. Try another made of round rocks; realise that trolls may very well develop tufts of grass on their upper slopes. This one has a short spiky hairdo. Make mental note that some trolls could have 'hairy' shoulders or look like grassy yetis. Some might have grass skirts - Hawaiian trolls with slate ukuleles - or tufty tutus for rock ballet. For contrast, a third troll with a flat face and arms formed like stalactite-clusters.
Already thinking: how do they move about? What would their voices sound like? Shonaleigh has told me that the story involves a troll wedding, and now I'm beginning to  think about what makes an attractive troll and who the guests may be.
These drawings aren't art but a way of noting ideas for later and remembering ideas you didn't have time to draw.
The night before the start of a project reminds you that all your planning prepares you only for a class of phantom, hypothetical children while experience tells you that no child is hypothetical and
you can't predict anything about the class you will go into.

Monday night - the class at St.Joseph's have given me a heap of drawings to look through, illustrating stories they've read or invented. One idea is so far just a set of characters - three babies who plan a getaway in a borrowed car. Being babies, one has to steer while another works the pedals.
I want to know more about these babies. How did they decide on this plan? Where are they going? Who's the boss? Who's the reluctant sensible one? In a comic you'd have to use thinks bubbles to tell you what they were saying because all you'd hear would be ' ba-ba-doo-doo '.
I make it easier for myself by deciding that they're at least old enough to walk and drawing them sneaking on tiptoe. Two of them look nervous, the other has the wicked grin we drew in class. The children can show you how it's done.
This drawing is left in its raw pencil stage so they can see the stray construction-lines and bits of rubbing-out. The pencil-drawing is often more interesting than the finished, cleaned-up colour illustration, even if that's the prettier, more eye-catching version. It's useful to know that illustrators don't have special magic pencils that draw exactly what you want them to. Generally have well-used erasers because it takes them longer to find exactly the line they want.

A second drawing from the class is of a mysterious rider at the crest of a hill while three children hide in the foreground. I do a version on blue paper using black felt-pen and then white crayon for a moon in the sky and highlights on the characters and scenery. The trees' branches arch overhead, drawn with short curved lines that grow thinner as they divide and spread out. Those with an interest in drawing can look at the effect and practise it for themselves.
Blackline on coloured paper with white crayon detail gives you a very finished-looking drawing for very little effort. It can be very effective but the short-cut is very appealing.
I think that this scene is taken direct from an existing book and possibly even a specific illustration but by the time this version reaches me and I've inked over or redrawn it, like Chinese Whispers, we arrive at something new. It's a good reminder that how an image is drawn affects what we see and how we feel about it.

A third drawing, again in pencil, not this time based on one of the children's drawings : a woman in a soft pointy hat and long coat carries a suitcase along a stoney road beside a drystone wall where a sign reads 'Todmorden 2 miles'. A sticker on the suitcase reads 'For All your Wizarding Needs'. Behind her, a child, probably a boy but not necessarily, pushes a trolley bearing a fish in a tank. The fish doesn't look happy, but in the circumstances this isn't surprising.

Tuesday - This is mainly a day with another, Yr 3-4 class, but there's a 15-minute window before break to go back to 5-6 and review some of the drawing from the previous day. I can't respond to every image but explain why I chose to do the images I did in the time available last night. Some of the images are drawn so carefully and with the signs of an emerging personal style that it would be rude to take them and redraw them. Some are copied images which are well drawn but give me nothing to add. We've talked about characters being nothing without something for them to do, a setting, at least the suggestion of a story. The story always comes first and if you're careful and lucky, drawing it out will give you more ideas for the story.
Two of the drawings I looked at were real 'boys' ' drawings, one labelled 'Death Doodles' in big letters, another of a huge gangster shoot-out.
The Death Doodles cover the page in delicately pencilled monsters, decapitations, disembowelments, severed limbs, sharp weapons and hails of gunfire. To highlight the important bits there is a lot of red pencil strewn about.
The shoot-'em-up is one scene drawn in quite sophisticated perspective, viewed from the elevated angle familiar from console games. The ground is littered with massacred figures, a car's windows
have been shattered and the bodywork is so peppered with bullet-holes it looks like a giant colander. It's a boy-thing to discover the power of drawing to make adults go 'eeew!'; just as they often like to retell the more splattery parts of the vid-games they play. I'm pretty pragmatic about this. The subject-matter often gives an unconscious expressionist glimpse into a vivid inner life; the
intensity of the visceral violence is often the equivalent of playing music at top volume. Meanwhile, if the activity is interesting enough to keep the child drawing, then (a) that child has a channel of expression open [if you have the nerve for it, asking the child to describe the content of the drawing is also an exercise in descriptive language and can be informative] and (b) s/he is more likely to
stumble on small breakthroughs by trial, error and observation of his/ her own work and is more likely to look more closely at how comic artists, game designers and animators build and render their images.

Yr.3-4 have given Shonaleigh a story about trolls and they've also been working on a story about a dragon, so we had a look at how to draw both and talked about troll-life. What for instance might a
lovestruck troll take to his sweetheart as a present? A Box Of Rocks is the answer. These could be a bouquet jewels or a selection-box of tasty stones - Chocolate Chalk; Gravel Cluster; Coal Toffee; Pineapple Crystal (delicious pineapple fondant in a crunchy crystal coating). I'd like to see these, like the helpful diagrams you get with boxes of chocs.
We imagine a football match between trolls and dragons and make a drawing of a player from each team. All of this helps me because in my mind's eye I'm 'seeing' all of this. As each small detail is conjured up it's a bit like imagining a society from evidence gathered at an archaeological dig. Troll
weddings and football practice-matches give them things to do and say, and the characters I've sketched out begin to lumber into life.
So thank you, Yr.3-4. I'm looking forward to doing the troll-pictures for the story.

Wed-Thur: Ferney Lee School Jan 23rd-24th.

My briefing on the Ferney Lee story is that it involves an Alien craft crash-landing and its pilot meeting an old man with the mechanical skills to repair it. Somehow this involves the super-intelligent hill-sheep of Calderdale.
This is about the right amount of information to take into a school; enough to get started, not enough to develop very fixed ideas beforehand.
In preparation, on Tuesday evening I draw up a picture of a couple of Aliens as we 'know' them: those little grey guys with almond-shaped faces and eyes. Interesting to see how our picture of the Alien has changed in the sixty-or-so years since a USAF pilot first coined the term 'flying saucers'. Even the idea of the typical spacecraft has changed from the upturned metallic soup-bowl to big delta-wings, disc-shaped lights, illuminated flying jelly-moulds - a What UFO? catalogue of intergalactic models. Since they haven't so far attempted global domination we have to assume the Aliens we encounter are tourists, so I draw a couple in T- shirts an baseball caps, carrying implements loosely based on the racks of weird weaponry from the Men In Black movies. These ones aren't necessarily weapons, just big chunks of Alien tech.I draw up another flip-chart sheet of assorted Aliens to remind us all that our images are essentially made-up. Aliens will be as varied
as the environments of their native planets.

Arriving in class on Wednesday morning, I hear that Yr.5-6 have been looking at ghost-stories and science fiction, but it was Yr.4 who were directly involved in working up the Todmorden story. That's fine; we all start from the same place. Almost from the outset someone points out the physics of intergalactic tourism and the mind-snapping distances between stars that make this improbable. This is a useful reminder that we are free to use our imagination, and also of the bad science used to explain Alien visitations, an extension of our tendency to use gossip until information turns up.
I think it was Shelley who said of faith that, like a spider's web, it needs only a few fixed points on which you can hang an elaborate structure. This isn't so far removed from belief in and speculation
about Aliens.
The morning is given over to drawing and thought exercises which gives us time to keep Alien-story ideas in the air until the afternoon, when we'll see how they settle and sort. In the afternoon I'm very impressed with the way class divides into groups to pool ideas and report back. I'm always interested but slightly disappointed about the tendency to graft characters from media franchises into imaginary stories - The Simpsons are hardy perennials, or currently High School Musical . One
of the ideas involves Aliens coming to Earth to (a) destroy the planet after (b) disco-dancing with one of the High School Musical characters. Charitably, you can argue that these characters operate in a tradition of folklore and myth. Less charitably you can say that these deliberately demographically-targeted merchandising constructs are the equivalent of narrative ready-meals

By that evening I have a small heap of group ideas to look through and draw from. Though I don't know the High School Musical characters I quite like the image of The Alien wigging-out at the disco. The pencil-roughs of another story feature a saucer-UFO crashing at the top of a waterfall and the alien thrown out of the craft to slide down, where it meets the old guy from the original story. In the drawings, the Alien has a shield-shaped face with slit-eyes, so I draw up the first frames of a comic version and make the Alien a robot - another sf movie convention, and easy to draw using a framework of cylinders.
I also draw four different version of the old guy, in various styles to show how as a reader we enter into the story in different ways depending on the 'pitch' of the images. Part of the power of oral storytelling is that the stories in our imaginations look exactly as we want them to. Another story has big fat calorie-hungry Alien tourists dropping in for a burger meal on Earth. This involves a novel plan for world-domination: resistance is rendered futile with the use of guns which squirt chocolate direct into the mouths of victims, who find it so delicious that they want more and more, and their appetite is so hyped that burgers and fish and chips become irresistable until they're too fat to fight.
This story is really attractive, not only because the characters would be fun to draw but because as a plan for world domination, we could look around us and believe it might be true. Again, this is worth kicking off as a comic.

On Thursday we review these images and get on with discussing how to build casts of characters and planning out a storyboard or comic-strip. This idea really takes off so we go with it and by the end of the day we have four flip-chart pages of comic - 'The Fish Who Yelled Shark!'
The class snatch the roughed pages from the desk as I finish them and get to work inking and colouring, and the script written for the characters into the spaces I've left is genuinely funny, a real
pleasure to read at the end of the day. I always say that for those less interested in drawing, illustrators depend on good writers, and this is a brilliant demonstration of cartooning as an extension of literacy.

Mon-Tue Jan 28-29th: Todmorden C of E.

Turns out that the school had me in the diary for Tue-Wed, I had them down as Mon-Tue, so thanks to the school and Mr. Halsall for changing their schedule at short notice. All I know about the story came from what is locally known as The National School. It involves statues coming to life. I'd spent some time at home drawing some of the customary poses and gestures in civic statuary, but without clues about what the living statues were supposed to do, this becomes a very soft-focus exercise, quite frustrating.
On the Sunday evening back at Cross Farm I'm still trying to think of something useful I can take in the next morning and in the end I draw four 'sculptures' of The Cartoonist stuck for ideas. Again, Yr.5 haven't been directly involved in concocting the story whose outline I've heard, so we discuss statues around Todmorden, which I haven't seen, and in general the reasons for erecting statues;
where you find them; what materials are used; styles of sculpture... then we move on to other drawing activities to let these ideas settle in, and return to the topic in the afternoon. When we return to assembling ideas for a story the class divides into groups and reports back with a variety of themes:
A soldier from a Welsh war memorial climbs down and marches to the beach to guard the coast (reminding me of Anthony Gormley's beach sculptures - the lone soldier on the tide-line is a very attractive image).
Scattered crystals from a passing comet not only bring statues to life - e.g. a statue of God turns birds into stones - but it also summons up Ice Giants Of Neptune from the ice of the North Pole and an Army Of Light, who have a 'massive battle'.
A sculpture of a dragon is struck by lightning and crashes to the ground because its wings are too heavy to fly. The townspeople adopt it as a pet.
A statue of Mr. Blobby comes knocking at the window of a lonely boy and they play together for a year, when the statue goes away because the boy has learned how to have fun. (I like this story with its elements of traditional folk-tales but would like to substitute another character for the statue)

In the evening I take the pages of written work and work up an image of the dragon struck by lightning and the comet-inspired sculpture of God turning birds to stones in the air. When I take this second image into school it's worth pointing out that if the story was that God did this I'd have to think very hard, because I'd have to think of some way of representing God. In this version I'm able to depict a statue, for which there are examples, masking my job much easier.
When we return to the story on Tuesday the consensus is that the Dragon story is a good starting-point. Half-an-hour is long enough to cover the whiteboard with details we could build into a story. Everyone throws in ideas with only a general idea of how they will fit together. This bit can be slightly scary if you have to bring the ideas together, and in this case we have elements as diverse as the frequency and uses of dragon-poo and the design of aircraft based on dragon-wings.

One of the class asked if we could make a book of the story and there's a good book's-worth of story here. I've started on this to give a flavour of the possibilities, so I'll note here that in this version some ideas that could be chapters will appear in paragraphs, just to give an indication of the range of Yr.5's imagination.

Meanwhile, Wednesday morning in Stirchley...
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I'm still writing the dragon tale and looking forward to doing some pictures for it but at the moment I'm awaiting draughts of the 'official' stories. In the meantime, time for some geekery about software because the subject's been hovering in the wings.
This goes into the blog partly because it's not very interesting. The artist's life isn't all flashes of inspiration and aesthetic introspection. It's nice when inspiration strikes, when you've unconsciously set up a domino-run of half-thoughts so that the last to fall switches on a light-bulb, and if you're lucky there will be time available for the introspective free-fall, but a lot of the work is practical housekeeping and clock-watching against a deadline.

Over the past month I've spent an inordinate amount of time, breath and email on the topic of software and reflecting on how much time we all seem to spend talking about the health and maintenance of our computers, not as prized pets but as an extension of our own health.
Mine's a Mac, always has been since I was given a cast-off Mac IIci in '98 and first sat with the hum of the cooler-fan and that clickety-click of the processor counting binary beans while it figured out what I wanted it to do. In 2001 I took delivery of a graphite G4, second from top of the range at the time, sleek, cool and hair-raisingly fast and powerful.

Until last year it could still do everything I wanted it to but Apple had changed their operating system so radically that to keep the G4 running was becoming an eccentric task, like running a classic sports car for which you have to find remaindered parts from specialist dealers.

You'd hope that the revised OS would be smart enough to read all the old software and for a while there was a 'Classic' setting option that begrudgingly deigned to recognise it. This year I finally had to admit a kind of defeat and jettison (hem-hem, 'upgrade') the entire rig, a process that lost me three years of emails, my well-used Wacom graphic tablet, scanner and printer and all my perfectly functional software packages, not least Photoshop, my reliable digital painting kit and crayon-box.
I'm sorry that this will begin to look like product-placement, but there's no way round it. Artists have favourite paint and brush-ranges just as musicians have differing tastes in guitar strings, but these are nuances of preference in a competitive world of options. Software is heavily branded and specific. It's as if certain brands of guitar strings would only allow you to play a limited selection of chords; as if the crayons you bought would only allow you to draw a specific range of shapes.

So here's the thing: all I want is some way to get drawings into the computer and colour them.
Until the computer arrived I drew on artboard and coloured with photo-inks - not those varnish-based art-shop inks in tiny bottles with cute labels - and crayons and art-shop quality grey-blue fibre-tips for shadowing.
You could build up colours in thin glazes but you only got one shot at it. If you spilled or smudged or misjudged, you'd had it. This was a pressure when you had a Punch cover to complete that had to be on the train to London by 6:00am latest, and on a couple of occasions I had to make a line-call around midnight, to stop trying to retrieve a situation and start again, before driving to the New St. station Red Star depot in the early hours with a brown paper package on the back seat and a brain caffeine-bombed into a replica of consciousness.

My first computer was really just a super-fax, for scanning black-and-white drawings to send to the Berlin studio. Colouring only really began for me in 2000, along with the delivery of a graphic tablet and pen, and it was a magical revelation; retrievable, alterable colouring with algorithmic airbrushes. Real airbrushes in the hands of real masters like Philip Castle and David Draper were the graphic look of the 70's but I could never cajole them to behave for me.

Now, in 2008, real artwork on real artboard is a quaint memory. I'm shocked at how dependent I've become on the electronic box but that's the reality. Hence the software-anxiety.

Over the past month I've been looking for anything that might perform the colouring-box functions of Photoshop without all the photo-editing capability it's built for which I really don't need. With a graphics package the computer is a space I work in; without it, the screen is a surface I look at. I've wasted far too much time on YouTube this month.

I've just sent Richard an image for the website which Shonaleigh described to me over the phone, a variation on a theme I've returned to over decades:
The Fool On The Hill, possibly my favourite Beatles song, clearly the most haunting.
With only one image to think about, it took up a lot of dithering-time in sketchbook pages before I committed to the A3 black-line drawing, which had to be scanned in three parts and fitted together on-screen, but which at least walked me through the functions of the new scanner. The image then sat on the hard-disk for weeks while I ransacked the web for colouring options.

This first image is the result of experiments with a demo version of Corel Painter X, which seems the only serious rival to Photoshop.
If you're using software for artwork rather than photo-editing you only find out how useful it is once all the functions become second-nature. In the first week or so it's like taking delivery of a new car; your brain can take in where the lights and wiper-controls are and you begin to get a feel of the gears and accelerator, but driving is more to do with educating your spinal-column than your cognitive faculties. As evening falls you want to flick on the lights, not check the dashboard for the switch and remember which way it turns. However pleased you are with your new car, it all feels slightly wrong.

As a new vehicle, Corel has a lot going for it, not least that it costs about half the price of Photoshop. The website has many examples of quite stunning results produced with it. There are on-line tutorials that give you clues about its features, which I've been trying to absorb.

Photoshop manuals are like the A-Z of a city, large parts of which I never visit but I know my little neighborhood pretty well. Corel is like moving to a new town where I still have to find the good bookshop, art store, bakery, the locations of the High St. banks... I'm throwing metaphors at this but it's a virtual world after all.

I still have a couple of weeks to run the Corel demo but as I write this I've shelled out for Photoshop and I'm awaiting its delivery with the eagerness I once reserved for the arrival of X-Ray Spex or The Hypno-Coin, objects of desire from a lost world of comic-book small ads.
For this project I want to maximise time available to work on the images rather than spending time finding the brushes and paints and the Selection and Layer tools that let me work on one area at a time without messing up adjoining bits. Unless you work with this kind of software, this is where the discussion shelves off into the jargon-pool of geekery.

In passing I'll mention my attempt to work with Pixelmator, an independent stab at reproducing a lot of P-shop functions, which I really wanted to like, having seen an on-line video-tutorial about it. A lot of time has clearly gone into making it attractive and intuitive and temperamentally I'd like to support the indy sector as I do in music and film, but my demo version kept falling over within a couple of minutes of start-up. There are some pretty unforgiving entries on the website forum, so I hope the guys persist and triumph in the end. If they can get it to run reliably I'd buy it just as a round of applause for effort.

However, for now, once the Photoshop disk is loaded I can free a part of my mind for deadline-anxiety.

Now for Thursday

Another picture from the story I'm still taking time out to write.The Todmorden Dragon story just sprang into life and sprouted in the last day of my school visits. I think it would be quicker to draw it
as a comic than write it, only because language is another paintbox for me ( my irritations at the routine abuses and impoverishment of language in advertising, management and politics amount to an allergy).
It's fun to have an excuse to play responsibly with language. As there's no real deadline I can call up the draft first chapter and add a bit or edit a bit much as you'd turn to a crossword book, in between working up the illustrations. At some point this first-draft will turn up on the website.
Tod CofE came up with loads of directions to go and Yr. 3/4 at St. Joseph's, thinking around trolls and dragons, planted the idea of those split rocks with crystal interiors you get in souvenir shops
being ejected dragon-poo, which fits neatly into the story of Todmorden's adopted dragon and into a tradition of folk-tales explaining the world as we see it.
The town finds that the dragon is harmless when it rescues a cat from a tree, so that's the latest image.

While I was pencilling it the radio was mulling over a new government initiative to get Culture into schoolchildren. This prompted me to think about what I'm doing in schools, which I'm quite happy to describe as teaching craft skills, almost a term of abuse in the big-A Art world. Is it Culture? I'd say it is; an echo of the tradition of apprenticeship to the craft guilds that produced the
majority of art work for centuries, when the artist was a highly-skilled craftsman.
The craftsman's work is in part a knowledge and experience of the properties and tolerances of the materials and in part a refined appreciation of aesthetics and the ideas behind the product. The skills and practice provide a vehicle and good reason to explore the ideas.I suspect that the initiative to expose children to Big-C Culture will be another of those irreproachable aims delivered mechanically, as if Culture was a UV-bed and that exposure to the product will somehow give kids a Culture-tan. Some teachers will use the opportunity; most will realise that one way or another they will have to generate another folder of Ofsted-directed evidence that exposure to Culture has taken place so that fridge-magnet philosophy can be repeated and evaluation boxes can be ticked.

So... as I was trying out a technique for rendering foliage in the computer it flitted across my mind that the result had 'something of' Courbet or Fragonard at visible screen-size and as with traditional
representational canvas-paintings, something of Abstract Expressionism right close-up. When I visit galleries I'm less concerned with the cultural/historical location of the art and artists, more interested in the exhibits as Made Things: the how as much as the why. The illustration I'm sending today is a result of fairly quick work, maybe two days' worth from initial pencil-work to the pared-down emailable version for the website, and a lot of the process is concerned with purely practical means to ends rather than big aesthetic ideas. However, even this simple little image is informed by
years of exposure to examples of colour, rendering and composition by others gifted with exceptional talent and given the gift of time to refine their art.

Anyone who spends any time around schools will recognise the routine displays of work imitating Mondrian, Van Goch, Rothko and Andy Warhol, artists with clear stylistic brand-identities. Teachers are pretty much obliged to generate these displays as evidence. Is this exposure to Culture? I frequently wonder how we would react to a gallery which considered it useful or appealing to present artwork with the 'best bits' cut into irregular shapes and mounted crowded together at jaunty angles. The class may be able to repeat the names of these artists and recognise their work, but any idea of composition, technique or concept respectively is cancelled out in the bargain-basement presentation of school-corridor folk-art. This is a pretty good reminder that the map is not the territory; Culture is not a property of the artefacts but a quality of the attention we bring to them. If the infusion of culture is really to become government policy then by definition it invites pretty rigorous interrogation of its philosophical project. Teachers learn for their own good that there are no credits for interrogation, only for 'delivery'. I await the package of instructions that will constitute
what every child should know.

A BIT ABOUT GRAHAM:

"There's a point in the conversation where people say 'So... What do you do...?'
I say 'cartoonist', or if I'm feeling insecure, 'illustrator'. They brighten, and say
'Oh! An "artist"!' Well I don't know. See what you think....."

Summer term 2004 -'The Door To Everything' -retelling of the story of The Williamson Tunnels and their architect, Joseph Williamson 'The Edge Hill Mole'.
Summer Term 2005 'Making Waves'These projects were funded by ALT EAZ, Croxteth, Liverpool, working with storyteller Shonaleigh Cumbers and a sculptor to link three primary schools and Croxteth Community Comprehensive in events combining performance, music, sculpture and artwork..
In 2004 I worked in all the schools involved and in 2005 I was primarily artist in residence at Ranworth Square Primary School combining project work with visual aids for curriculum lessons.
Autumn Term 2004 - 'Tree Stories' project for Sheffield Council, making and illustrating stories based on trees from around the world planted in Sheffield Arboretum, also with Shonaleigh.

Ongoing: sessional work in schools and with Birmingham, Solihull and Walsall Library Services.

Read more about GRAHAM HIGGINS a.k.a POKKETTZ at www.pokkettz.demon.co.uk