The Bergische Kräher

Not that I am in any position to keep animals at the moment but should the opportunity ever arise I would love to have some chicken (and pigs and goats and turkeys...). They would have to be rare (i.e. endangered) breeds, of which there are, sadly, plenty. One of them is the Bergische Kräher (Bergische Crower), one of the oldest chicken breeds in Germany. There is something elegant and kind of aristocratic about their frame and plumage; the hens, for instance, have black and goldisch yellow feathers.

Having said that, the Bergische Kräher probably is the kind of chicken breed one shouldn't keep in an urban environment as these birds belong to the long crowers with the roosters' crow lasting up to 15 seconds. Although, personally I would much rather be woken up by this "opera chicken" than the noise of cars, construction work and drunk people on their way home from a night out.

Gardens of Bateman's

Since I have come to England I have been doing some voluntary work for one of the National Trust properties, Bateman's in East Sussex. Part of this was creating individual border designs for the new garden information sheets:

The Formal or Rose Garden,

... the Orchard,

... the Mulberry Garden

... and the Wild Garden.

All the plants, as well as the chicken, can be found in the respective gardens. The only exception is Puck (yes, that Puck), to be seen in the bottom right corner of the Wild Garden, who is not, in fact, an actual inhabitant of any of the gardens. However, there is a literary connection between him and the Wild Garden through a book by Rudyard Kipling, famous former owner of Bateman's. Puck's design is based on his description in "Puck of Pook's Hill".

Hats and caps

This is actually an older drawing (ca. November last year) which I did because of the trouble I had with, well, drawing hats (I know, preferably you do this before you start drawing a comic). While there are a lot of historical pictures of hats floating around the internet, I still was not entirely sure what it would look like when you put them on your head, so I watched some period pieces in order to see how to wear Regency hats - mostly Austen or Austen-related stuff, even though I am not really a fan of this kind of stories.

 As for the four ladies, each one carries two hats and a night cap with her, except for the maid Betty who only  has one rather plain hat and a night cap. Jane's hats are adorned with flowers, Mary's are decorated with feathers and Henrietta's are fur-trimmed.

Most of the hats depicted above are taken directly from fashion plates published around 1811.

Carriage design

Edit: New version uploaded.

A few days back I finally made a little concept study of the carriage in which the ladies are travelling - something I really should have done right from the beginning. It's nothing spectacular but now I should have a good grip of how the carriage is actually supposed to look like.

Page 6 - Ink & Text

It has been an awful lot of time since the last update and I don't even colour the pages right now (but will do so eventually). Anyway, at least there is finally some action going on - even though poor Mr Heart probably would have preferred otherwise.
One of the advantages of having a flatmate who at the moment is doing her state examination in dentistry is that one picks up some bits about medicine here and there. This way I learned that a sudden, unexplained pain in the left arm is a good indicator that one suffers the beginning of a heart attack. Always good to know - not that knowing what is happening to him would have been of any help to Mr Heart, being in the middle of nowhere.

Well, not entirely pleased with the scanning of the page; thus, I will probably scan it again and upload a new version over the next few days.

As always, in order to be able to read the comic properly it is advised to open the page in a new tab.

Page 5 - Ink & Text

Since it allows me to get on with the story faster, I decided that for the moment I will only upload the inked and lettered version of each page. They will not be left this way, of course, (I love colour way too much to do such a thing!), but the process of colouring takes up quite a lot of time. Therefore, I will come back to do this at a later point when I have more time on my hands.

In order to be able to read the comic properly it is advised to open the page in a new tab.

Page 4 - Ink & Text

Several things have been keeping me busy during the last months, but here is finally the inked and lettered page no. 4!
The novella dear Jane is refering to is "Undine" by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué. Maybe it is worth mentioning that her less romantically inclined companion Henrietta is indeed right with her assumption about the Knight Huldbrand's character as he dumps his unusual wife for boring Bertalda.