The Villains in my Home Town. part 3.

T he technique used for court sketching is usually pastels or some similar quick-sketching medium. But my pal Pete Mullins had gone in using the pantone© markers of the graphic designer, which was an interesting approach I thought. Nobody sets out to make a career of court sketching, or at least I don't think so, therefore it's interesting to see artists from different sub-disciplines moonlighting here. For instance, in many of my images you can tell that I'm at heart a cartoonist. An artist who is on other days a sculptor, or a landscape painter, would approach the task in quite a different way from me.
I followed Pete's lead as I didn't have time to give it much thought (i.e. I was needed tomorrow morning), nor did I have a box of pastels handy for that matter. My own way was very linear to start with; pencil and then tighten that up best I can as after a couple of outings I knew they'd always zoom in on the face. Then I'd take it to the canteen where I could spread out with my tools, outline with a fine marker and then fill with pantone colours based on colour notes I'd made in pencil.



This pair set a sleeping vagrant on fire for a laugh. The man died in hospital. In agony I guess. The boy on left is pixilated because he was underage. There's a paragraph at the foot of an earlier post about the pixilation of faces



Later I started to experiment with a quite different way of making the sketch, by working quickly on ordinary typing paper with Pantones of very subtle muted tints. the paper would be constantly soaked so that the end result had the look of a watercolour painting. And all done with markers. This enabled me to get away from that cartoon look toward something more photographic almost.



But then I missed some of that character insight I was getting in the earlier style.



This man abducted a schoolgirl and raped her.

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If my courtroom sketches are starting to make you feel that Australia isn't a safe place to walk about in, check these out. Just in from my pal White, writer of the Playwright and other works of note. This is one of the country's best beaches.



And these are the boys who live on it.



Talking about nasties, we have occasionally in this blog visited the subject of spiders which eat ya. Check out this one, or don't , if necrotic flesh upsets you.

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From Hayley Campbell: "harking back to your post on Feiffer, THEY'VE DRAFTED MUNRO!"
German army drafts four-week-old baby Tue Apr 10, 2007 BERLIN (Reuters) -
The German army sent a draft notice to a four-week-old baby named Lucio, ordering him to report for duty within the next 10 days, before realising it had blundered.
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Youtube: Shat and Joe Jackson perform Common People
(thanks, mr j)