Method In The Madness #1

Green Man

Hi Folks.

So, there's a new piece made its way off the production line. Which, as we're all here and imagining it, I picture as being a cross between a mangle and a conveyor belt driven by an old donkey who keeps getting distracted by errant butterflies.

I've always loved Green Men. My brother is a bit of an architecture nut and growing up in Yorkshire there's a fair few old abbeys and cathedrals to gawp at so if we ever found ourselves at one of a weekend he'd make it his mission to locate one of these amongst the gargoyles and angels and saints' heads which decorate the eaves and archway keystones of such places. But even in the largest sites, with the least amount of walls left standing, it was something of a reassurance if you stumbled upon him. Even if half of his face had been melted away by acid rain or pulled away with the weight of the side of the arch he crowned that crumbled. Even the more shall we say 'expressive' (aka leering, gurning, nigh-on-teeth-baring) models had a stoic quality about them - that of a calm and quiet witness, who has seen all that time could throw his way and is no longer phased by things, no matter how strange.

The Green Man is one of those old deities absorbed into the new Anglo-Christian religious order when the British Isles were first converted from paganism. His image - often a bearded male face with his features made of oak (or similar) leaves - is synonymous with the concept of death and rebirth, as well as the turn of the seasons and is heavily featured in ecclesiastical sites likely as a means of linking paganism and Christianity. Sadly, like many deities and facets of our pre-Christian faith, there isn't much else known about him or what he might else have symbolised. Paganism did not leave much in the way of paper records, and what records they did leave such as artefacts and the like have either been lost to time or simply been repurposed by the worshippers who came next. Think of the celtic knotwork crosses you see so many of, especially in older churches. An ancient custom even then, assimilated by the new religion as it swept the nations.

One of my favourite depictions of the Green Man is not in stone however. It is (shockingly) in a book. 'A Monster Calls' by Patrick Ness, illustrated by Jim Kay, which I read about five years ago and has sunk itself into my bones and shows no signs of fading. If you want your heat ripped out and an adrenaline rush in the same moment, that book'll do it. And the story of how that book came about will do the trick as well.

So, onto the drawing. I promised myself I wouldn't accidentally morph into a recipe blog which takes three pages before even mentioning the reason you clicked the link in the first place!

Green Man Final

Despite what my portfolio (which I might end up re-sorting in the next couple of weeks) might suggest, I tend to draw trees more than anything else. I can't help it. Ruddy love the things. How can you not? I'm slowly managing to identify a handful of them with the help of my Dad, and there's no better feeling than being on a walk and finding a tree that neither of us know off the top of our heads. We have tree identification flow-charts which we typically always leave at home so Google Lens is invaluable in such situations until we reach a point where we are organised enough to actually remember to bring our references with us next time we tramp off into the wild. The latest discovery has been a young (probably five or six years old) English Walnut about three miles from where we live.

Like I said, I draw trees more than anything else if I can help it. Thing is, they take a while. My own fault, its my own technique. My own madness. And I'm not changing it any time soon.

When we look at trees, when we look at the bark, we see the relief. The rivulets and peaks and grooves formed over the years as the specimen has reached, reached, reached for that distant sun. Even in the tamer woodlands of Britain, where competition for sunlight and maximum photosynthesis is far less fraught and life-or-death than in rainforests where your time is run out already unless you can grow fast and tall and lucky enough to reach the canopy layer where sunlight is actually available.

With my trees, I tend to focus on the negative space. Drawing in the shade between the light and leaving the latter to speak for itself.

It is much more about the detail than the form with trees. I start with a quick pencil outline of the structure, the layering of the scene I'm creating. There's never just a couple of trees in a forest, no matter which way you look. Even in winter, when the foliage is far more sparse, there is crowding to be found. I placed my Green Man - putting him back in the forests from whence he originally came - on a trunk in the foreground of the image, almost as if you were standing at the edge of a forest looking in and the Green Man was watching you as you prepared to step past. To step over the threshold and into his kingdom.

The timelapse above (my first ever attempt and once I've gotten a better grip on angles I'll try and do one for a whole piece) shows much of that process, progressing from pencil to pen outline and then the beginning of the detail.

a little look at the detail

The detail. The detail.

I create the negative spaces through a sequence of waved and straight lines, dots, dashes, wishbone corners, and circled dots I've secretly dubbed 'dendro-freckles'. You can see a little of that in the video above - although I was a bit of an idiot and decided to do the detail on the opposite side of the page from where the camera was focused. Better service next time, folks, I promise. May Ness' Green Man come for me if it isn't.

There's no particular pattern I follow here, it really is a 'go with the flow' process. Which is great in some ways, as it means even I don't know what it's going to look like until the thing is done. and not so great in others... wrist cramp... twitching little finger because it likes to prang out at a right angle with no warning halfway through... no shortcuts if there's no real map.

It's all 100% worth it.

This one took me about seven hours from start to finish. I work at A3 scale for the majority of my tree pieces done in this style because simply put there's no other way to get the level of detail and layering I would want on any scale less than that.

And here she is. Until next time, folks x

Green Man's Welcome