The Time Period of the Town of Blacklead: A Bit of 1600's Art History

The story of Blacklead is set loosely in the mid 1600's. I say loosely because I'm more interested in
working on the story than the historical correctness, and I don't want historians to freak out about details that inevitability are wrong.


Why the 1600's?

 Mostly the art history. The time of trade, exploration, and superstition. A time when a certain wood from South America was extraordinarily expensive, often stolen or transported by pirates, and used by the Puritans for their dark clothing. Irony.
 Graphite was also expensive, and the biggest richest deposit found so far was discovered in the mid 1500's in England, North of where Blacklead is fictitiously located. Other names for graphite at the time are wad, plumbago, and dun dun DUN....blacklead. You'll just have to read the story.
But seriously, it was expensive. Think about how they strip search diamond miners for shiny rocks; yeah, that. Graphite is a dry lubricant, and great for making things slippery....like cannons.

I did not choose this time period for it's ease of drawing, for I am more familiar with other timer periods and would have been easier to draw those instead, so learning experience for me, and that accounts for some of the research that I have to do anyway.

    Yes, it's the time of Captain Hook hair, the Three Musketeers, and men wearing more lace and fluff than the women. Again, I like to make challenges for myself when drawing. Cool factor is increased, and so is the time to draw it. Oooof.


On the plus side, I've got plenty of very authentic picture reference.


Places I get my art history knowlege:

Logwood
http://waynesword.palomar.edu/ecoph4.htm

and one of my favorite nerd books:

Color: a Natural History of the Palette



Also half timber houses. Half timber houses are cool. Like bowties.

Starting to write a graphic novel.

 

I've never written a graphic novel before, but I want to chronicle the journey along the way.

 More publicity, more history for the final product.
 And so, I'm starting with story ideas and a script. It's already traveled pretty far from the original story idea, which I will keep secret because it may be another GN someday. But my artistic insecurities tear up my cute little stories, and don't want me to go on. So I have to ask some pretty heavy questions. But I don't want to give away anything about Blacklead yet, it's still so early in the writing process. Maybe I should. But I think I will wait until I get some character concepts.

Here are some questions I try to ask myself when writing:

• Why is this story important? 
• Universal truths, people.  The empowerment we get through fairy tales and superheroes. A story is valuable when it values you.  
• Once I decide what's important, I keep going back to that when writing. Trying to make it about too many truths at once is above my pay grade right now.
• Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.”― Ralph Waldo Emerson
  
  
• Is it something that needs to be said? 
• This helps give me purpose instead of thinking that I'm generating pretty fluff and trying to get paid for it. Instead, it's something that I can say, needs to be said, and even if it's been said before, I can write it in my own viewpoint, and that makes it new. 

• Why is ___story element__ important?
• I started this story about Blacklead thinking about a town with a mysterious supernatural fog. Sure it sounds cool, but that element didn't have much to do with the story. I was trying to find ways of writing it in!  I can find another hook, so I'm not going to use it as a gimmick if it takes that much effort to make a part of a good story.