Cartoons and Illustrations by Steve Bonello
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"Storm" ...attempting something dark

20/6/2014

1 Comment

 
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My worst moments invariably come when I have finished a piece of work and am stuck on what to do next. This invariably sends me into a flurry of manic doodling...exploring figures...poses...ideas, and normally takes two or three days of aimless sketching until something clicks and an idea starts taking shape.

My last flurry of doodling (thoughtfully indulged in during breaks from my previous drawing) produced this sketch among others ...I thought it was an interesting pose but leading exactly to where? Somehow the visual became connected in my subconscious with recent media stories about Ireland's notorious Magdalene Laundries and more specifically the gruesome discovery of nearly 800 children's remains in a septic tank. From there it was just a small step to linking the image with child abuse in general and more specifically child abuse by persons entrusted with the care of children. A horrible scenario but one we are all aware happens all over the world. In our little corner of it too...  



Did this sketch start to paint the picture I wanted? Well it was just a line drawing and definitely required some atmosphere. A dark one. So on to step two, a less rigid rendering in ball-point...

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Here's the rough sketch, a bit more defined, the story told a bit better. It's a dark night, a storm is raging outside and the child clings to the adult for support. What happens next is immaterial but I think the ingredients are there for something less than innocent to take place. A tableau I find interesting, menacing too. 

Here is an almost "complete" sketch I can work upon. My gut feeling is that this will take me some time and I will have to restrict the palette to a few colours with dark hues dominating. Without sounding perverse I feel that this will be a work I will enjoy doing. It is a newish subject for me even if I stumbled on the idea quite by accident. But then I have always believed that random doodling is priceless and really opens doors to ideas which would otherwise be difficult to think up. Subjects suggest themselves through doodling. 

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Satisfied with my sketch (I reckon it is enough to go on) I now start on the work proper...a few (and more than a few) hours of "blacking in" the paper with pen strokes, using just black ink dispensed from a single 0.13 (mm) pen. 

Because the pen has such a fine line the inking in is a slow process....more so as I know this will be a dark picture and will therefore require thousands upon thousands of strokes. But in the meantime it gives me the chance to look and assess my work as I go along. This is very preliminary work in fact. Getting a feel of it is what it's all about really. 

I feel that getting the lightning bolt right will be pivotal to the success or otherwise of this work so I start immediately on this area of the drawing and introduce Prussian Blue around the bolt. 


This is more of a reference for myself and will (hopefully) help me gauge and control the darkness outside the window. A visual reference if you wish... For actual lightning reference I am using a couple of random pictures from the internet - most of the time I do not look at them but now and then one does feel the need to have a little peep again...

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Having completed the stormy sky with the single bolt cutting through, I am quickly realizing this will be a far more time-consuming piece than usual. To get the level of darkness required I needed to be more than generous with my pen strokes...plenty and plenty of them. 

Still it is a satisfying experiment up to now. Next I did the "landscape" outside the window - basically a mix of green, blue sepia and black - and am now starting on the window edges themselves. 

I am also slowly darkening the shadows... initially behind the two main characters in order to bring them forward so to speak...


Since I now have to start colouring the rest of the drawing I have gone back to the rough sketch I did at the beginning and am trying to pencil in a colour scheme. Roughly yellow and sepia for the wall, grey to black for the man's vestment, a dirtyish pink for the girl's night dress and yellow for her hair. Subdued flesh tones for the skin. (Pic below)
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Work in progress on the drawing with the working sketch in the background 
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The background now more or less completed and I start to tackle the figures...
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In detail...the window and the male figure. I am using black and violet for the cassock.
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The frightened child in close-up 
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And finally, twelve days after starting out, "Storm" is looking more or less finished. I must admit I am quite satisfied with the result. My only dilemma is actually when to stop but I feel that stopping here is just about right. The image, though with a hint of menace about it, is also  fairytale-like - even if the tale remains a dark one. 
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Bla Kondixin - and my tiny contribution to it...

17/1/2014

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Last September, a few days after I was made redundant by the aquamarine bus company, I was contacted by an old friend and asked whether I would be interested in contributing some work or ideas for the yearly Bla Kondixin show. To cut a long story short (you're here to see the clips right?) I worked on the idea of a cartoon strip morphed into a short (funny I hope) story. I worked on the story and the story board stills and the magic guys over at Lighthouse took that up and did the animation. I was quite pleased when I attended Bla Kondixin and er... actually heard people laughing watching these. Chuffed really.


This one treats the hunting issue in a somewhat bizarre way...

And this...um...no comments required I guess

And of course I couldn't resist to take a dig at my old employer... though I just provided the idea here and directed the right guys to the right bus stop :-)
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Rummaging through a Drawer

16/9/2013

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I was quite taken aback a week ago when I was asked to attend an interview and told to take with me "any references and certificates you may have"....

I had not been asked to produce my assorted O's and A's and my Diploma from the University of Malta in ages. I searched high and low (mostly low - the lower forgotten drawers) but after an hour or two of fruitless rummaging through drawer after drawer I had targeted all the likely - and some less likely - places, but drew only one huge hollow blank. It was only some hours later that my dear wife thought of the one huge drawer just underneath the bed....the elephant-of-drawers in the room. Yep there they were in all their yellowed glory. But more interesting were a few drawings I unearthed in this forgotten well....drawings of youth really...full of angst, tension, anxiety...the sort of stuff I am not really up to any more these days but which I still look upon with some loving.


I can hardly remember how these were done - most probably an assortment of inks and I definitely used wax candles to get the interesting effects. Some are dated (mostly 1985) and some are not...and none are titled. Enjoy! 
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Undated and untitled - but I guess the inspiration comes from the cover of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures...
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Undated landscape - this must be countryside outside Rabat
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Figure dated 1985 - wild guess is an Egon Schiele influence
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A variation of the landscape further up with imaginery telegraph poles thrown in - and I am sure the Dire Straits hit was the influence on this one....loved the song then...and still do somewhat 
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I think this is a copy of mine of a very early Picasso - something the master had done before his teens.
I was twenty four when I did this...further comment is superfluous.
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The Repeat Visitor

11/6/2013

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Repeat visitors to a website are always a good sign. Of the 11,500 or so visitors to my site, only about 1,800 have made the journey back as repeat visitors. It is difficult to gauge repeat visitors coming from my native Malta as the analytics program I run recognizes just three places out of a possible 80 or so localities in the Islands, but it can be a little more precise geographically regarding larger countries - or so I assume at least.


Someone from a place called Delray Beach in Florida has been visiting my site regularly recently... always straying quite long on the Drawings and Graphics page (or possibly leaving the tab open and forgetting all about my lovely work...) I am flattered actually - unless of course it's the curator of the Museum of Bad Art (yes - it exists actually) looking for new acquisitions, or the U.S. National Security Agency sniffing for irreverent or subversive art.... 

I'm curious. Could it be you reading this? Drop a line and say hello if so!
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Drawing again...stroke by stroke

10/3/2013

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Starting out on a new drawing. Trying my best to keep things simple. Do not feel like tackling complicated stuff. Have no idea how this will end up and have not yet thought what the background will be. Playing it by ear...
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And this is what it's looking like some two weeks later....two weeks in which I was busy doing other work but also dedicating a couple of hours two to three days a week working up the cross-hatching. Up to now using only one pen - the Faber Castell TGIS 0.13. Will have to start thinking of colors soon....
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A digital camera and Photoshop come in handy to try out a couple of color schemes and I rather like this one - so freeze here and let's start the drawing proper...which might turn out somewhat different as I go along...
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A couple of days later and the color scheme is slowly being put into place...stroke by stroke.
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A detail of the man's face as the drawing progresses...
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A more marked yellow to the background and now it's about done... I used just colored inks this time with a variety of nib sizes and I did not feel the need to enhance and enrich tones by colored pencils.  Started sketching this early in March and managed to complete it in about 20 days in between other deadline-dependent work.


                         I humbly present.. Cecilia and Herbert

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A few more early drawings...

17/1/2013

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I hate the time when I am not working on a "proper" drawing - something that takes up a couple or more weeks from start to finish...a drawing I can mull upon while building bit by bit. It's that time right now so I doodle and think until something crops up and I have a work-in-progress to look forward to a couple of evenings a week at least. 


To beat this boring waiting period I scanned a few more early drawings - yeah and I haven't posted anything here recently either so... 
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An old sketch this one - must be the time I first read A Clockwork Orange...
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Shipyard worker - sketch from 1987 or thereabouts. 
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Woman out shopping - I don't think I ever developed this idea further...
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The Wizard of Marrakech - a drawing from 1987 - the only time I visted Morocco. I was struck by the colors and smells of this amazing country and the city of Marrakech in particular. I did some sketches while there
 and later developed a market scene from the various drawings, This remains a favourite drawing. 
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Untitled drawing also from 1987. Nothing came of this. 
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Start to Finish 

25/11/2012

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Away from the mostly digital work I do there is nothing I enjoy more than picking up pen and paper and working on something I will do purely for myself, something that is driven by the simple need to draw - drawing as a relaxing and (yes) therapeutic activity.

A few weeks back I started mulling over the theme of the mother and child - a theme repeated oh so often in religious as well as secular art. So I played around with a couple of sketches until I had a working drawing I could use to take off with. When it came to putting in a background it just had to be a Maltese themed landscape - and it was then I hit upon the Gozo Citadel (ic-Cittadella in Maltese) as possibly the ideal backdrop.

I have always loved the view of this ancient redoubt sitting atop its rounded hilltop as you are coming down the road from Zebbug so I chose that particular angle . The rest of the landscape I left as simplified as possible.  

By my normally very slow working rate this one was completed pretty fast... I started the pencil sketch on 3rd November and a day later started working with ink. I completed this on the 25th November - less than a month. Good job I never got the Sistine Chapel commission.  

I used Faber Castell TGI-S technical pens with nibs ranging from 0.13 to 0.35 and Pelikan permanent inks in various colors: black (naturally), vermillion, cobalt blue, yellow, green, sepia and burnt sienna. I rounded off with a light dusting of Faber Castell Polychromos colored pencils.

I took shots of the drawing as it developed and here they are...
The Citadel Madonna - a blow-by-blow account!
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    Working drawing. Baby Jesus needs to be altered...
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...and off we go. Work in progress.
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  Introducing cobalt, vermilion and burnt sienna inks...
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Sketching in a background with a couple of pics for reference
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Giving the background wall, fields and citadel some color: using green, cobalt, yellow, burnt sienna and sepia
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Almost done with the ink...now a few touches with colored pencils...
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                     ...and I reckon "The Citadel Madonna" is ready!
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           Madonna face detail
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            Citadel detail
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The Big Hug

14/9/2012

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Finally completed The Big Hug! I spent way too long on this one - considering that the note on the back of the drawing says I started doing the preliminary pencil sketch at the end of....May!

But then again... in the intervening period I have slaved at the day job for forty hours a week, and completed about 25 cartoons for publication. I have added a few blog posts here as well and have tried my hand at freelance writing for the first time. More on that later hopefully...

Add to that it has been one of the hottest summers I ever remember too - that has sapped my energy big time and not made working any easier.

The worst bit was giving the final coloring push last Monday after a long weekend abroad (see previous post) and very nearly ruining everything. Thankfully that did not quite happen.


Oh well, I am pleased with the finished item so that is good enough for me. I hope I will start on something new soon. What that  might be remains to be seen.

Small irrelevant detail -  in The Big Hug I did not draw the clouds of course and only drew the sky around them. This provided an idea for my cartoon strip (pictured below).

Waste not, want not!

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Early Cartoon Work

2/9/2012

3 Comments

 
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Ironic really. I have written about several subjects but I have never featured any of my early cartoon work here. As I said in one of my first  blog posts, I made a conscious decision to try my hand at cartooning after visiting Ralph Steadman's Between the Eyes exhibition in London's South Bank Centre in 1984.

Most of the sketches here date from that fateful year to 1989. Most of them started as pencil doodles until eventually a few lines indicate the features a face might  take. A few of these early drawings served as preparatory sketches when I eventually started to do more "finished" works, some others were never utilised. The medium is ink and sometimes a few strokes of colored pencils were added.

Enjoy!

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Work in Progress number the Nth

1/7/2012

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After labouring so much on my last drawing I thought a simpler design would perhaps tax me slightly less... so here is the happy pneumatic couple on their wobblesome dance of life.

There will be color in this one and I am reckoning on bright and lively coloring. Bright blue sky and for the "dance floor", it will probably be a grassy hilltop.

Only problem is I am frequently quarreling with my pen (!) as the response I get is not altogether in synch with the pressure (or lack of it) I apply.

I thread cautiously with non-reversible pen work - and in 30 degrees plus heat ever more so.

Excuses excuses....


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