When Waterton Banned the Badger

Waterton letter

Charles Waterton always regretted his decision to evict the badgers from Walton Park when setting up his nature reserve in 1826. He feared that they might undermine the ‘poacher proof’ wall that he’d built at a cost of £10,000.

I’m using a quotation from a letter he wrote to Alfred Ellis in May 1864 as the basis for a comic strip. My aims are;

  • to experiment with developing Waterton as a comic strip character for a project that I’m working on for Wakefield Museum
  • to see what the possibilities of comic software Manga Studio Ex4 are
  • to use my Wacom Intuos 4 graphics tablet to produce artwork

 

rough

Comparing the initial pen and ink ideas and the blue graphics pad roughs which I produced in Manga Studio, you can see that pen and ink works best for me but I want to follow the process through. Manga Studio is versatile enough for me to incorporate scanned drawings if that’s what I prefer to do. For now I’m working through the quick start guide chapter of Doug Hills’ Manga Studio for Dummies. I’ve been through it before years ago but never got back to the program since.

Waterton

Here’s my first attempt at the first frame of Waterton in penitent reflection. It’s been drawn using the graphics tablet with the default pen tool, the ‘G’ nib. For the hands I used the PhotoBooth program on my iMac and photographed myself in the pose. I might have been overacting a bit!

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