I created the above piece this month; it’s my contribution to the Periscope Studio charity auction, with drawings going up for sale on eBay and proceeds going to Peace Winds Japan, a partner of Mercy Corps that’s providing tsunami and quake relief in Kesennuma.
The piece is NOW UP FOR SALE. Please consider bidding. I’m really very fond of the piece, and I’d like it to go to a good home (and do some good along the way).
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My earlier comments on how this piece came about, from my Tumblr:
Trying to come up with a subject to depict, I was struck by Mike Clarke’s widely published AFP/Getty photo of a girl on an evacuation bus:
I also have a love of classical ukiyo-e art (and the early 20th century revival of many of its techniques, shin hanga).
(detail from “Woman in Summer Garment” by Hashiguchi Goyō, 1920)
So I tried to combined the two. It was an interesting experience.
Here’s a higher-res image of Luther as the Fool.
Adding the book, the watch, and swapping the little dog for the wolf were all fun notions to carry out, as was swapping the mountains for the treeline.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of people who are mostly familiar with the Rider Waite tarot assume that the little white dog is this handsome young troubadour’s loyal pet. In the history of tarot depictions of this card, however, the dog is an angry local mutt actively trying to bite the Fool. The Fool isn’t always a happy young Bohemian, either.
Here’s the original, by Pamela Coleman Smith, under the art direction of Rider and Waite:
And here’s the Fool from the version of the older Tarot de Marseille deck, by Jean Dodal:
In my defense: sometimes these things just happen when you’re an illustrator. With an eccentric brain.
This little abomination is up for sale on Etsy if you’re looking to decorate!
Now and then I have to implement a scene transition that, when read without the follow-up page, makes for a klunky reading experience. This is one of those weeks. However, there is a pleasant solution for this (general) problem, which is to read the comic in book form! There’s one week left on my $5 off of Family Man Vol. I deal, and juuuust enough time left to receive a package for the holidays.
I’ve also been drawing a series of modern tributes to the medieval Danse Macabre motif, the (very silly) original art for each of which is up in the Etsy store. A new death goes up each weekday until I run out of ideas! You can also see the whole set on Flickr by clicking the thumbnail of “The Fitness Enthusiast” below:
I’ll do a proper roundup in the blog when I tire out, but Flickr’s a good place to follow along from home.
There’s also some original Family Man art in the Periscope store which is looking for a kind and loving owner:
Because I don’t think I ever mentioned it here! Aren’t they cute, those kids. They’re so doomed.
Those of you familiar with my graphic novel Family Man will know that I have spent many, many hours drawing people wearing tricorn hats. It was a style of headgear that stuck around for quite some time, and it seems to be the first shaped hat designed expressly for the purpose of driving artists crazy. (Later fashion provided us with the fedora and the cowboy hat, in which crucibles many a cartoonist has died screaming.)
I know that you don’t want to be that person who gives up and just draws a vague lump on your character’s head. I can’t help you with the fedora or cowboy hat – but I’m here to lend you a hand with our friend the Tricorn.
There’s one very obvious solution for how to go about properly drawing a tricorn at any angle: buy an expensive reproduction hat online and pose or photograph it as necessary. However, that will net you many hours of digging through endless Halloween store shopping results for shapeless faux-leather “Jack Sparrow” pirate hats and weird little woolen cereal bowls with a weak brim claiming to be “Colonial hats”. When finally you get to plonk down $400 on an accurate drawing prop, you’ll probably want to do violence to your fellow human beings.
The next most obvious solution, if you’re broke or slightly insane, is to hunt down vast numbers of screen captures from appropriate period films. I will cop to having, on hand, roughly a gigabyte of stills from 1776: The Musical: The Movie. I will not claim that these have been unhelpful, but perhaps you aren’t interested in paging through 53 blurry images of Blythe Danner in a corset in hopes of locating that one angle of a guy in a hat.
It’s also wise to keep in mind that any period film is ALSO filtered through the period when it was filmed – hence, in 1776 we learn that Thomas Jefferson really liked 70’s style brushed-up temples.
So if you are looking for the simplest, cheapest, most rudimentary tricorner hat hack: get ready. This will provide you with the basic folded planes of the tricorn hat so that you can sketch out the essential shape; you’re on your own for deciding the style of the crown and providing the subtler details of material and curved blocking.
Those of you who have celebrated Purim by eating hamantaschen cookies will recognize this procedure.
YOU WILL NEED: a piece of foldable paper, a pair of scissors, a pencil.
STEP ONE.
Cut out a circle of paper. Cut it to whatever size you like; don’t worry about the shape being perfect. (a slightly oblong shape might actually get you more accurate results later on.)
STEP TWO.
Draw an equilateral (equal-sided) triangle inside the circle so that each point touches the edge. Again, don’t worry too much about deadly accuracy; these are just folding guidelines.
STEP THREE.
Pinch in the paper at each point. I find it’s easiest to first pinch up two points, then move on to the third.
STEP FOUR.
Now that the points are pinched up, it should be easy for you to fold the paper along the pencil lines. The triangle is still flat, but the extra half-circles of paper stick up.
STEP FIVE.
Behold! Whichever corner sticks forward the most is now the front brim of the hat; the other two form the back. The triangle is the underside of the hat, where your person would normally stick their head in. You can arrange this little paper thingie at many common angles and immediately figure out the basic arrangement of the hat’s trickiest parts. You can see that the angle I held the model at roughly replicates Luther’s hat down in the inset image.
If you want to replicate the crown of the hat, make this model big enough to accommodate half of a ping-pong ball (for a round crown) or a bottle cap (flat crown), and glue or tape it on.
In actual hats, the “corners” were often not tightly pinched together, especially in the front, so if you want to replicate that look, let the tips of the triangle run off the paper, skip the pinching, and just fold up along the lines.
Now that you have this model, I recommend you go back and look at those screencaps, or at any trustworthy reference source, to fill yourself in on style and material details/divergences. These hats were made of anything from light felt to heavy leather, decorated with ostrich feathers and gilt, tied down, worn askew, blocked so that they sat more on the back of the head than the front, etc, and came in every size from bitsy to engulfing.
Regardless, this little model will help you draw a tricky angle when your reference sources aren’t working out.
Enjoy the increased ease of drawing one of history’s most frustrating hats!
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ADDENDUM: lovely reader Jenn S. made up a nice little cheater template for those of you who don’t want to draw your own circles and triangles! Click to view and download at full size, then print and use at will. Thanks, Jenn!
