Tag: Masters of Defence

Work continues

I may have mentioned that I will be releasing Gloriana in ten 16-page installments. Each will end on kind of a cliffhanger scene. I’m wrestling with this one. The bad guys (the wizards Cornelius & Valdes) have followed Elizabeth to Kat Ashley’s school. When they don’t find her there, the bad guys burn down the building.

I don’t like this kind of scene. It’s gratuitous violence. I feel uncomfortable watching all the wanton destruction in a Mission Impossible movie, for instance. The last one I saw Tom Cruise wrecked half of Venice by driving his car into everything. I had a hard time watching Mel Gibson’s Patriot when the Brits burned down a church. So, sure, I’m a sensitive plant.

On the other hand, I need to show you that my protagonist, Elizabeth, is in grave danger. If my villains don’t do awful things, they’ll be mere comic relief.

Here is the sketch of Cornelius & Valdes and their henchmen walking away from the burning school.

Thumbnail sketches

The GLORIANA manuscript is written. You’ve seen that I’ve been designing the characters (I think I got almost all of them now). The manuscript needs to turn into a graphic novel—that means lots of pictures. I need to map out how I’ll tell this story visually. So I start with thumbnail sketches. Little rough drawings—no frills, half-size—whose job is to give me a starting point for drawing the tight sketches.

John Broadbeam

Here’s a rough sketch of a rough character—John Broadbeam, one of the pirates aboard Gloriana. He’s not a historical character; I made him up. Broadbeam will help Elizabeth escape England. I’d originally thought to cast Brian Blessed for this role. Broadbeam is a big, hearty character. As I’m drawing the storyboard, though, I realize a polyglot crew would be accurate even back in the mid-1500s. Beside that, I need a little visual variety. I can’t have all the big, hairy guys looking like Henry VIII.

So John Broadbeam is black. Should he be English-born or from North Africa?

Here’s Brian Blessed, skip to the 1:00 mark.

I don’t have a particular actor in mind for Broadbeam now. Maybe I’ll just keep drawing and get a feel for him.

Consortium boardroom sketch

As I mentioned earlier, I added to GLORIANA’s story: an evil cabal of wealthy financiers who want to take over the kingdoms of 16th -century Europe. Most of the architecture in Elizabeth’s world is Tudor-style. To differentiate the world of these bad guys, their architecture will be mediaeval Gothic. This is a sketch I did to help me visualize their world. Gothic looks heavier and more imposing than other styles.

If, like me, you’d been a student of art teacher Rolly Ivers at Cicero High School back in the 1970s, you’d have been given an introduction to architectural history. It was one of his passions. We all had 3-ring binders full of the mimeographed handouts he painstakingly assembled. I’ll always be grateful Rolly shared that with us. Because I have that foundation, I can whip out a sketch like this even before doing a bunch of research. Of course, I’ll look up Gothic interiors to amplify and fine-tune what I started here. But having a well of images in my head helps me to work efficiently.

Katherine Ashley

Henry VIII banished his daughter, Elizabeth, from court. I can’t discover why, except that Elizabeth did something to upset him or they had an argument. I don’t know if she were under house arrest or sent away. For my plot, I need Elizabeth to be banished to somewhere so bad guys can kidnap her.

In history, in real life, Katherine Ashley was Elizabeth’s governess. I decided to monkey with the truth and make Kat the headmistress of a school for young ladies, say half-a-day’s ride from Hampton. Now I have a destination for Elizabeth.

https://thetudorenthusiast.weebly.com/blog/the-life-and-death-of-kat-ashley
https://www.sparknotes.com/biography/elizabeth/section1/