Adventures in Time and Space

This is a wonderfully atmospheric serial, an old-fashioned spy drama, I needed to get in that tension, the image of the guillotine. Then I saw this picture of Susan and Barbara – what a juxtaposition… So I based my sketch around that photo. But how to do it? I’ve done a fair few pastel drawings so far, so how about something different? Taking a cue from the maps and prints that appear in the Historicals around this time, I decided to do an ink drawing. No the last time I did any ink-drawing, it was when I had a terrible cold, so wasn’t going into the School of Art for a week… ended up sat there stippling for a week. So, no stippling then. The thing is, It’s a picture that lends itself to some very soft modelling, and here I am working on it with a very linear medium! Sketching out the proportions in pencil, I then did most of the drawing with an ink pen (Parker 51, probably the most beautiful writing implement ever mass-produced!), strengthening some of the lines with a fine marker pen (Sharpie, yuk.). After this I went to block out the background with an ink-pot and pain-brush, but discovered that watering down some ink and washing it about really softened the image of Susan and Barbara, heightening the delicate look. I’ve framed them with some lines that are suggestive of the shape of the guillotine, too.

This story has such a strong design style, circles are used so well in it – on the one hand, they are used to add to the claustrophobic atmosphre of the spaceship scenes, on the other, they add a lovely sense of scale and air to the Sense-Sphere scenes. It’s these two very different atmospheres I wanted to bring to the sketch. The Sensorites, too, are like this. On the one hand creepy, eerie, they are also an advanced, civilised people.

Finally, I wanted to bring a sense of the adventure and fun of the annual illustrations to this piece. I’ve used nice, complimentary orange & blue (a combination I use a lot!) with hints of yellows to get that feel, with lots of contrast.

Crikey, after some quite difficult stories, where visuals were rich and diverse, and hard to pin down, the Aztecs sems so obvious – it’s all about the sacrifice, the contrast of savagey and society. It’s an obvious image to go for, the “perfect sacrifice”, and I’ve added the hint at some rectilinear structures in the background – the story is, too, a tribute to engineering and design. I’ve rotated the body so as to create a better tension – is the torso prone, vulnerable, or raised in an act of worship?

Where to start with Marinus – it’s a set of episodes I love dearly (Terry Nation’s quest stories are deliciously good fun), but impossible to pin down to a single image. It could work as a series of illustrations, but really after a couple of portraits, I felt it was time to go abstract, subconsciously layering up elements of the settings. The story has such a colourful tone, too, I felt it was time to get out the acrylic paints, and just jump in!

Well this is really Marco’s story – so another portrait! I wanted to emulate the iconic image of the real Polo, but to bring in an element of the Doctor Who story – Mark Eden is actually a great face to draw, angular without being overly lined. (I hate all lines and wrinkles, uses far too much charcoal!). I kind of liked bringing the idea of a palimpsest into this, adding scraps of the journal scenes as background. Marco Polo’s life is presented to us through his journeys and his writings (you wouldn’t want to be sat oposite him at a party!), and the story is so episodic.

This is a really straightforward 2-parter, one set and four actors. So, where to go with a sketch? I decided I’d do a couple of portraits (actually I hate doing this from photographs, but hey it’s the best source I have at my disposal, not actually being in studio in 1964…). Ian and Barbera are the obvious ones… The Doctor and Susan seem too distant in this story. Hopefully I’ve got a bit of tension in the image between the two faces, too.

Having donetwo colourful pastel images, for this one I pared it right back (a bit like the story), using graphite and white pastel on tinted paper. Looking at the two faces looming out of the loom, I added some slashed of white over the top – hopefully it suggests that we’re looking out from the Tardis to them.

Then I came to quickly spray some fixative on the finished image… grabbed this spray can… and covered the damn thing in spray-adhesive. Oops. I really ought not to keep those two cans side-by-side! Thankfully it seems to have dried with no major damage. Actually, it’s probably added to the patina of the image – looking at it part of me thinks I should have smoothed and blended a bit more, but then again, the image is rough, textured, slightly unresolved, the faces are lost. A bit like the Tardis crew then…

This is such an iconic story – the design is flawless. How to pay tribute to that in a sketch? I wanted the Dalek to be misty, smeary, blended into the fabric of its’ environment. I also wanted to contrast it with the Thal imagery – such as the crude viking drawing of a warrior in their history files?

The Daleks are n inspired design, but their strenth is my problem here – they are so three-dimensional! They’re designed to be seen as an object. In depicting one, I took inspiration from Ray Cusick’s design plans – published in Doctor Who – The Early Years – to give an axonometric side-view.

For colours, I went for light blue and orange, which reflect the silvery design of the Dalek city, the orange complementing the Dalek casing’s colour too, and to try and get a feeling of the brightness and heat of the Neutron Bomb that hangs over this story.

So it starts…
For this sketch, I wanted to use the junkyard setting as a way to explore what was to come – for Ian and Barbera, and the viewer with them, it’s an entrance into another world. So I took that idea, and started filling this environment with colour and layers suggestive of the Tardis interior, and the caves of 100,000 BC.