TV sketching! And a new season of Midsomer Murders has commenced…
But first, an older episode: “Death and Dust”, from season 10:
It’s always fascinating watching extras, but particularly when they’re all suited up in blue scene-of-crime suits. Such high contrast with almost everything — particularly the more bucolic Midsomer settings — and really interesting to block in visually.
There were so many animals in this episode I convinced myself the solution would be something to do with them.
The really striking buildings are tempting to draw, but the camera doesn’t linger long enough! You can’t rely on just capturing a sense of movement in the same way as with people. (Well, you can, but that’s not usually what I want to convey with the architecture.)
And intriguing lighting can also be tricky to capture at this speed — but I keep trying.
I’m pleased with that red teapot above — it’s similar to one of my favourite pieces in the illustrations I did for the QUT Art Museum, .
Season 23 Episode 1: The Blacktrees Prophecy!
Half my friends are thrilled there’s a new season, the other half sheepishly admit to never having watched an episode of a show which they’ve definitely joked about and which began in 1997.
Anyway: more blue suits!
Tough as it is to capture anything recognisable, I do still enjoy trying to get down interesting compositions and scenery.
Also this episode had a bonus orange suit to draw.
(Also a continuation of vaguely Minoan-inspired border design.)
As ever, this exercise was both useful and soothing. And also as ever, I enjoy murder mysteries for the narrative hijinks they permit far more than for either the murder or the mystery.
The sense of someone being gradually taught (and learning) the next stage of their profession, and being somewhat supervised but also getting to be clever occasionally. Why? The charm of the learning-of-a-craft and the romance of the acquisition of competence. (Related: The Romance and Horror of the Navigable World.) (There’s a note here that says “nb also ducklings” and I’m not sure what the context of that was.) This was also connected to previous notes on the charm of listening to apprentices inserted into the ceiling of my house: Sparks and Navigable Worlds and Improbable Inventions.
master & apprentice stories vs journeyman & apprentice stories — with magic
Endlessly stable central family never entirely uninvolved. I’d already been thinking about this more broadly (see Favourite Tropes About Families) and it would show up again.
a family calm in the heart of chaos and/or ghosts
Good Guys defeat main Bad Guys but minor Morally Questionable Guys get away with a small windfall easily overlooked by the other parties. E.g. Sackville-Bagginses.
a tale of one bad mouse
Someone whose tall stories/colourful background turns out to have been completely true. (Less Big Fish and more flashmob society funeral). The opposite of secrets — the truth not believed/credited.
As usual, most of these include notes on how to adapt/adopt an idea. The “why” dot-point in the first entry was worth doing, and I’d like to do it more. And several points of fascination would show up in other entries.
Art/writing exercise
Basically, this is a way to take contained, useful notes about something you’ve seen/heard/watched/read. But it’s also an excellent way to identify fascinations, activities, and creative puzzles that you want to pursue (and to always have something to say about a topic).
Think of something you’ve seen/heard/watched/attended/read etc. You don’t have to have liked it.
Think of five things you could steal (i.e. learn, adopt, adapt, try, not plagiarise) from it.
For each, if you want, dig a little deeper. Why this?
Then for each, make a note on how you’d ‘steal’ it — how you’d adapt it into your work or life or a particular project. You don’t have to follow through on it, as the thought exercise alone is quite useful. But you might!
Listening? In my living room, anyway
Support and/or follow
If you’d like to support art and writing and posts like this about it, here are some options:
I have a Patreon account (patreon.com/tanaudel) where you can get behind-the-scenes process and sneak-peeks, starting from US$1.
The rule is: I can’t pause the show while sketching.
First, “For Death Prepare”, in which rehearsals for Pirates of Penzance are interrupted several times (and some very early Midsomer tropes are teased).
Midsomer Murders s22e5: For Death Prepare
It’s a delight drawing characters in flamboyant costumes (see also the Murder, She Wrote sketches). The flashy shapes and colours are easy to focus on, which takes some of the stress off drawing the other sections.
I kind of love those flying birds below, top right.
Midsomer Murders s22e5: For Death Prepare
And as ever, lighting and protective wear remain interesting and entertaining to draw.
Midsomer Murders s22e5: For Death Prepare
The Witches of Angel’s Rise skewed more towards Gothic melodrama.
Midsomer Murders s22e6: The Witches of Angel’s Rise
Below, I particularly enjoyed (enjoyed?) speed-drawing the reflection in the mirrored sphere (top right), and sketching a painting (lower left) and the bucket reflections (lower right).
Midsomer Murders s22e6: The Witches of Angel’s Rise
I also really like that little sketch of the figure and the bowl, third down on the right — simple shading and strong light.
Midsomer Murders s22e6: The Witches of Angel’s Rise
Also, as ever, the architecture of Midsomer (above) is a delight to draw, although the camera rarely lingers quite long enough.
Also, generally, I like the excuse to use orange.
Midsomer Murders s22e6: The Witches of Angel’s Rise
For other TV sketching, see TV SKETCHING. For previous MidsomerMurders sketches specifically, see:
More Midsomer Murders sketches! These are from episodes 1, 2 and 3 of Season 22.
I’m experimenting with Gallery view — if you click on a picture, it should let you see it larger
I’m really enjoying these speed-sketches. I started them mostly to get/keep in practice using the Procreate app (I’m sticking with a traditional media base for my art, but there’s always some digital editing). TV sketching, however, does require faster reflexes than actual cafe sketching, because while the models viewed from a cafe do walk out of view, the scene is rarely actually cut mid-stride, and there’s no fancy camera work. On a show, however, the views and clothing are more varied, and occasionally the camera angle and lighting are dramatic. Also, it’s cool to look back at a few pages from a single episode and see if there are patterns or colour themes.
(And of course it remains a useful way to draw when excursions are limited.)
The rule continues to be that I am not allowed to pause the show while sketching.
I’m practicing with the Procreate app by sketching during shows. Usually I draw people (see: Beyond the Main Event and Sketching Mysteries), but this time wanted to shake myself up and test my (very low) tolerance for drawing backgrounds by sketching sets and buildings instead. The rule for TV sketching is that I can’t pause the show, which makes this mostly painless.
Midsomer Murders — either The Point of Balance or The Miniature Murders
Also my visual memory is indifferent, so I can’t tinker with the drawing for very long after the scene changes. But sometimes it also means I only capture the telling details. Sometimes. (See also: Lots of little bad drawings.)
Midsomer Murders — The Sting of Death
As with most sketches, I find a little colour can do a lot of work — explaining, unifying, contextualising. Colour, more than line alone, is a great aid to memory — both for recalling what I was looking at, and for remembering (or wanting) to look at that particular page of sketches.
Midsomer Murders — The Sting of Death
It’s also been illuminating to work out which bits of architecture I can and can’t extrapolate. Dormers I can work out from first principles, but windows are a more chaotic proposition.
Leverage — The Underground Job (I think)
Art/writing exercise:
Try to capture a range of settings from a TV show without pausing the show.
This can be in pictures, as above, or in a few jotted sentences — the things that leap out at you, the way you’d capture and describe that place.
It’s an interesting little workout, and a pleasant way to keep my hands busy when I don’t want to completely zone out during a show. Also, even if it’s a show set in places I like, I still find it makes me draw (or describe) places I wouldn’t ordinarily choose, and adds them to my mental thesaurus. (So far, I find murder mysteries particularly good at rolling through a range of interesting sets in an episode.)
(This is kind of what Travelogues is, of course, if you replace a TV screen with a train window.)
Bonus step: Make a note of what was easy and what was difficult (architectural terminology trips me up), and what you enjoyed and resisted.
I find this part of exercises occasionally surprising, sometimes affirming (I don’t want to spend my life drawing horizontal blinds), and frequently a checklist for deliberate research.
I’ve been sketching when I watch TV with my housemate in the evenings. Currently, that means I’m sketching Midsomer Murders. This is in the service of (a) having something to do with my hands and (b) test-driving Procreate on an iPad Pro I’ve hired for a month. (It turns out this is an option! I searched for business equipment hire places, and hired it along with an Apple Pencil — they rent Cintiqs, too, and I was planning on trialling both, but the iPad Pro is already very promising and considerably more useful than the very old one I last used.)
This is not my first time sketching Midsomer Murders, but last time I was using it as a source of passers-by in lieu of being able to watch actual people (seeBeyond the main event — experiments with sketching).
This time I’m using it for speed-sketching characters (since I’m watching with someone else, I can’t keep pausing). It’s an effective way to watch a fairly familiar show. I definitely notice certain demographic idiosyncrasies more than usual, for good as well as ill — there are lots of great character actors with interesting faces in episodic murder mysteries, and they skew older so there’s more to work with in terms of visible structure.
Also, while people don’t hold their poses, they keep reappearing, so you can try the same person again from different angles.
It was also very good practice to draw people in the act of speaking, the different ways they move their mouths, and how their teeth fit into them, which comes up less in some fields of illustration than in others.
And of course the ongoing reminder that the faster the sketch, the more happy I am likely to be with it. Here are two of my favourites.
Kind-of-sort-of Ruby Wilmott (Julia McKenzie) and Jack Fothergill (Sam Kelly)
So in an effort to find people going about their daily lives, I tried sketching people in the background of TV shows.
Advantages:
The background business is frequently less composed and dramatised than the main action (not always).
Generally, the full figures are shown.
There’s less detail, and so there are fewer distractions from considerations of pose and movement.
It’s pacy, especially with rapid-fire changes of camera angle — you have to sketch or lose the moment.
Watching just the background actors and extras is frequently delightful, and also a great way to rewatch shows.
Keeps my hands busy while watching Midsomer Murders.
Disadvantages:
It’s still cast and staged and costumed of course. I want to try this with background views in news or tourism or documentary footage.
Sometimes the camera cuts away too quickly — but then, passersby are often lost to view in the ordinary course of affairs.
The temptation is there to freeze-frame and sketch, but that would be defeating the whole purpose. (Leading to thoughts about sketching and temporality.)
I have more experiments to try, but this one was quite enjoyable, a pleasant challenge and an excellent excuse to watching the goings-on on Midsomer.
Writing/art exercises:
As above — have a sketchbook (or notebook) handy and sketch (or describe) background characters while watching a show (no pausing the show). Concentrate on movement, distinguishing poses, unusual lines — it’s about noticing, and training your eye and hand to communicate people.
When watching (more especially when rewatching) a show, pick a background character and imagine the scene or story from their perspective (sketch or write accordingly). I watch Pride and Prejudice with my dad a lot under ordinary circumstances, and much as I love it, I find myself reframing it as a different person’s story each time.
When looking at pictures (Pinterest, an art book, a virtual gallery tour), allow yourself to quickly acknowledge the main action. After that, you can only look at the background. What is going on there? Textures? Sidelong glances? Centurions being thrown off cantankerous horses? Tiny gilt angels no bigger than sea-monkeys? (I tried this with a friend once in a Renaissance exhibition and ended up in a very strange conversation? conspiracy theory? with a guard about rabbits in art).
Kathleen Jennings 