Alan Moore's London. part 1

I just found a stash of the From Hell reference photos I promised to dig out back on Dec. 4th. These are mostly the pictures Alan took or had taken while on at least two separate tours around the major places of significance in Fom Hell, mainly for my use in Chapter 4, which is the one that called for all the architectural stuff.
Above is John Bunyan's tomb at Bunhill Fields. While working on the drawing I noticed that the date of death on the tomb is two hundred years to the day before the death of the first Ripper victim. Below is a general shot of the graveyard from the same page. I wanted to head into this without a hint of menace. It's a pleasant morning in London, the sun-dappled foliage is almost abstract in its cheerfulness, and the presence of the gravestones underplayed. The Bunyan picture was at the foot of the page, changing the sense of scale rather abruptly.



In addition, the page also had Defoe's obelisk and Blake's headstone, with photos for each, so you can see that there wasn't a lot of room for mucking about.

I appear to have changed the light-source on the obelisk for compositional reasons.

Alan had a few shots of himself taken on the steps of Christ Church, Spitalfields, our principal centre of interest. The one I based my drawing on was a separate photo. Alan was moving away from the camera in increments so I could judge scale and distances, as you can see by comparing the two images. I was also very interested in the way the light was bouncing around on that portico. I made the drawing as a frontispiece for the collected Alan Moore scripts volume 1, another of those sad muddles that punctuate the history of From Hell, but that's another story.


ps. I don't know if it was I or Alan who made the mistake of running Christ Church into one word like that (as in the town in New Zealand. I believe it was a review by writer Iain Sinclair that drew attention to our error.)
pps. If anybody ever gets back to doing the scripts collection they'll be screwed. I just dropped the bundle of approximately 1500 loose sheets of From hell script all over my studio floor.
part 2 tomorrow.