At the Blue Boar an acquaintance of Pip's convict invites Pip, Mr. Wopsle and Joe
Gargery to a round of rum. While the other are having a good time, he xes his eyes
on Pip alone and secretly stirs his glass of rum with a le - the same le Pip had given
to the convict in Chapter III.
The rst thing that should strike us, is the fact, that the picture is in colour. This
I decided to do for multiple reasons: First, I wanted to enlarge my artistic horizon and
wander into regions I were'nt too familiar. Second, it was the 10th illustration I did for
Great Expectationsand to celebrate this fact, I wanted to do something different.
The character depicted on this image appears to my knowledge only two times in the
book. Once here, making himself known to Pip by stirring his glass with a le and later
that evening giving him a secret present from the convict, which consists of a shilling
wrapped in two One Pound notes, a lot of money back then, and once later, in chapter
28, Pip shares a stage-coach with him, while latter is being deported as a prisoner. His
outer appearance described in the book didn't really catch on to me, because I already
had some face in mind more on the lines of secret guy with scars and fedora hat. But
that didn't t. Furthermore I wasn't sure what his economical situation could have
been. Was he rich? Hardly, being a friend of the poor convict. Was he poor? Pip didn't
notice any ragged or threadbare clothes on him. So I made him look like what I thought
an unimposing man of the 1820s could have looked like.
The face gave me some trouble. In the book it is described that he had a broad-brimmed
traveler's hat on and a handkerchief tied over his head, much like a bandana. But for
some reason, I completely dropped the idea. The pipe survived though. The cunning
expression mentioned in the book also did gave me pains.
Finally I like to add, that I hadn't really an idea who this guy was and what role he
may have had in the book, and that it is much harder to develop a guy without either
background nor foreground.
The rst step in the creation of the picture was to draw a brief sketch in ink, which
then got scanned and ported into a image processing software, from which I did all my
painting. Thanks to my partial colour blindness I had to stick to a real painting picking
the colour I wished to use. This process I also repeated in later chapters, such as 14 and
18. In this case the painting was The Duke of Alba of Goya. The nice thing about brown
colour tones, is that you can use them at your leisure in a painting and pretty much no
one will be irritated by it. Whereas more striking colours like red, blue or yellow should
be used only sparingly when possible. In this picture I also left the contour lines of the
original sketch in the nal painting, a practice which I will have distanced myself from
in the upcoming illustrations.
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