Number five in the On The Buses collection is Stan Butler, played by the late…
Mabel Edith Butler
And here it is, the final piece in the On The Buses collection. It’s Mum, played by the late Doris Hare. And, yes, I know, I’ve cheated here by copying a still from the opening credits. Here come the excuses:
– I found Mum was a bugger to draw. I made two serious attempts and didn’t even manage a likeness of the character, let alone the actress.
– The thing about my collections is that I like them to be varied in style. Just having a cartoon picture from the credits diversifies the style in the collection and actually improves it.
– Really there were seven characters in On The Buses and the seventh one deserves to be recognised for setting the whole mood of the show. That forgotten character is Happy Harry. Who was Happy Harry, though, I hear you ask. Well, I’ll tell you, Happy Harry was the music in the credits. And if having this picture of Mum in the collection makes Happy Happy Harry into people’s heads, then it’s doing two jobs.
But what about those rejected portraits? Well here’s the first, from a couple of days ago:
I just didn’t like this one. It could have been any generic old wrinkly. I added outlines in black rollerball but that didn’t improve things. Then I tried using the blender pen. It smudged out lots of the black rollerball lines and probably wrote off the blender. I won’t make that mistake again.
And here’s my second attempt, from just after finishing Stan:
This one was based on a black and white photo, so started off as black and five shades of grey. The idea was to add the yellow background at the end for a bit of colour to contrast against the black and white. It didn’t end up looking great, though, so I added some blue pearl to the cardigan and blue pearl and flesh tones to the face. And I finished by adding black marker outlines. But it’s all wrong. Everyone that looks at this will think Scrooge. The face is just too male. Too young too, which is another matter. The blending of the colours in the face worked well, though, and the white gel pan gave Mum a good hair net.
Oh, and I’ve just seen Mum’s hair is missing in my drawing from the credits. Oh well. Makes it look less like plagiarism.
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