A seemingly easy page turned into something better

I had expected these pages 11 and 12 to be simple and quick to produce. Initially my thinking for these pages was to create an interlude in montage form. There were two basic aims to this: to create an impression of the artist at work; and to convey the idea that he was ‘lost’ in these developmental stages over a period of time, while he was (as seen in page 10) under pressure from a patron to get work ‘on the wall’.

There are almost no extant sketches or records of Uccello’s process, so I had to ‘reverse engineer’ his process, that is - work backwards from the finished paintings to imagine his studies and how these were brought together,. In particular (as it is such an important aspect of his work) how he created the perspective space.
I moved from the idea of a simple set of sketches to showing the artist making them. From this I developed the idea of an ‘iconostasis' effect, where the viewer quickly takes in a meaningful totality to the page before focusing on Individual panels. I proposed to make the page work as a single scene of the room, yet broken into 3 full-width panels that would represent different moments. The top part would show Uccello up a ladder drawing the upper part of the scene, the middle panel have him standing working on the lower part of the same drawing, and the lowest panel would show him drawing from props arranged on the floor.

The next challenge that arose was to have some discursive text about the process. I initially thought about writing Uccello’s thoughts in caption boxes. However I have only done that at one point in the story, on the first page where he thinks ‘how did I get myself into this?’, triggering a back-story flashback. While that was a precedent within the story, it still felt somewhat forced to use it more extensively here. My next approach was to have him talking to someone, and I wondered who. I had already used the device of him ‘lecturing’ his wife to explain the principles of perspective, and her bored lack of interest/understanding ironically pre-empted the possible reaction of some readers. However, I felt it might be repetitive to simply do this again, so came up with the idea of having different people speaking to him in each panel. This solution achieved my initial aim of a montage conveying jumps in time; and allowed for reappearance of supporting characters. 

This page is part of the narrative lull while the key antagonists (the patron Salimbini, and his major-domo Rocco) are away, and involves all the remaining characters: Uccello’s wife (name unknown); his rival Donatello; and his former master Ghiberti. These characters appear at (or near) the beginning and end of the story, so it seemed structurally helpful to include them in the middle too. The characters are each variants on what John Truby calls the character role ‘ally/opponent’ - they are critics of aspects of Uccello's work: for his wife - his inattention to paying commissions; for Donatello - his approach to space, and for Ghiberti, his lack of movement and action. As a learner writer, I had tried to follow Truby’s model of scene construction {which I worked into an aide-memoire table, Figure x] The element of conflict in their discussions keeps the pressure up on Uccello.

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