Tag Archive for: ship

A is for Articles

Here is your Monday dose of P is for Pirate—available in bookstores everywhere by Eve Bunting from Sleeping Bear Press.

The Articles were the pirates’ ethical guidelines which set out rules for behavior & working conditions aboard ship. New crew members signed them before becoming part of the ship’s company. Did you know that the pirate captain was elected—and could be voted out if he didn’t meet the crew’s expectations?

Pirates who couldn’t read or write made an X at the bottom of the contract and a clerk would write next to it, “John Manders (or whatever the sailor’s name was), his mark.”

More of that Wizards’ reunion art

Some shots of the image I’ve been working on for the Wizards’ reunion.  The Wizards were a bunch of us callow art students who formed a club for the express purpose of throwing parties.  This image will get put on a T shirt for the big weekend.  I’ll also be offering prints of it on my website (look for that in about a week).

Down at the bottom is the sketch I did for this project back in the 1980s.  I’m deeply ashamed to admit that the spelling and punctuation mistakes are all mine.

The Mayflower

Another spread from Two Bad Pilgrims.  This is the big splashy first glimpse of the Mayflower.

Here is the thumbnail sketch:

pilgrim.0405

Everything’s there that needs to be, but I was concerned that the direction of the drawing didn’t show the Billingtons being rowed toward the Mayflower in the background.

In the tight sketch, I turned the foreground boat around so we’re looking at its stern as it rows away from us. I had to scan this in two pieces—sorry.

p04

p05

When I drew the tight sketch, I worked half-size, so it was fairly easy to freehand the lines of the ship.  When I inked the scene, I worked at 125%, which is pretty big.  I don’t have enough control with a brush to competently ink in those lines at the larger size.  I wound up ruling them with a rapidograph, and used a homemade french curve—I traced the ship’s line onto a piece of watercolor board and cut along the line with a razor blade.  It gave me a nice smooth template to rule the lines with.

Here’s the inked and colorized image:

p06color copy

Colorization by Vince Dorse.  Click on the picture to embiggen.

Update—Vince has some more on the colorization process over here.