Here is the completed image, an aerial view of the activity in the court outside Scrooge's office :
I have tried to depict one of the street kids at the brazier to match the following image (also shown in a previous post), which is the same brazier seen from the perspective of the child :
(You can see all of the images I've made to date at flickr.com or on facebook. My screen name for both is V.A. Kenyon. Please leave a comment here, or on my flickr and facebook pages.)
Here are some more scans and one photograph of my work on this scene.
This is a tracing of the background from my original sketch :
This is that tracing, transferred and inked on the background sheet :
This is the background, colored in :
And this is a studio shot, showing the figures and brazier being colored in and cut out :
You can see all of the images I've made to date at flickr.com or on facebook. My screen name for both is V.A. Kenyon. Please leave a comment here, or on my flickr and facebook pages.
"In the main street, at the corner of the court, some labourers were repairing the gas-pipes, and had lighted a great fire in a brazier, round which a party of ragged men and boys were gathered: warming their hands and winking their eyes before the blaze in rapture."
I am making two images for this (although I am completing them in reverse order...art doesn't tend to follow a straight line). The first image is an aerial view of the workmen doing the repair work at the top of the image, with the street people at the bottom of the image. This image is an unfinished preliminary sketch. The second image, which is finished, "breaks the fourth wall", showing the workmen's brazier from the perspective of one of the street people (a child).
I have relied on two main sources for this. The first is, of course, Wikipedia :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_manufactured_gas
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Drawing_the_retorts_at_the_Great_Gas_Establishment_Brick_Lane.png
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gas_plant_Accum_(1815).JPEG
My second source is my own experience, of working construction many years ago, and of witnessing people suffering obvious and needless poverty in the United States and elsewhere, notably Southeast Asia.
