Mitchell's 'Press Gang' - Inspected in an alleyway

This is a picture from my Press Gang story published las December.
A group of builders are abducted by the Press Gang to work on HMS Dominator.
The full story is available as a PDF at mitchmen (Yahoo Group)

This picture is an example of how I put my series together.

It originally existed as a figure study only - just two figures and no background except for a symbolic port hole (suggesting the civilian had been abducted by the sailor and taken to his ship).
The moustache and hair of the builder are a clue to the age of the original picture!
I deleted the port hole and added the background of alley and lorry to suit the 'Press Gang' story line in effect moving the picture timeframe from 'after abduction' to 'before abduction'.

This is one of my own favourite stories. The basic scenario has been with me for many years and I was pleased how the final story came out. Visit mitchmen at Yahoo if you haven't seen it yet!

Evolution of a mitchmen picture

This picture illustrates the way I refine my pictures once the image is defined. The face in this image is a detail of the workman from the Building Site Incident story which I'm publishing soon. The original face I drew was quite latin in type but I didn't want the rather pouty mouth. Experimenting with the smile produced the second image - more anglo saxon and very cheeky. Still not right. I then went for the serious mouth in the third image which tidied up to produce the final version. This evolution shows how quite small changes to mouth and eyes can produce dramatically different results in facial appearance.

Following on the theme of my last post I now have the problem of numbering these images. They are basically the same picture and the paper version which now exists is version 4. But I want to keep all the variants for posterity. Looks like more suffixes are called for!

Mitchell's Picture Numbering - Engine Room Captive Navy Recruit

As I anticipated would happen, domestic commitments have slowed progess on my 'S&M Clinic' story but I am pleased with what I have so far.

The interim work designed to fill the gap is nearly ready and will go out in the next week. The working title is 'Building Site Incident' but I will give it a more punchy name for publication. As I've mentioned before this is a 'story board' format. The original drawings have several frames on one page but I will publish the frames separately or in pairs.

This has given me a little numbering problem - do I label each frame separately? I normally give each of my pictures a separate number for identification. One of the benefits of this was supposed to be a count of pictures completed. Unfortunately over the years exceptions have arisen; for example pictures forming part of a set have sometimes been given the same number with a suffix e.g M337a, M337b. Unfortunately this scheme was upset when I allocated other pictures to the set which already had their own catalogue numbers!

More recently the ability to scan and store pictures electronically has given me the ability to amend the master picture to produce a slightly different one and these have also been given suffixes e.g. M690.2 (see illustration). The end result of this is that I now have only a general idea how many pictures I have! I reckon it's in the region of 1000 of which 118 have been published so far. This includes a number of early pictures which are probably not good enough to publish.

For now I've decided to number the pieces of paper making up story boards not the individual frames. More about numbering in my next post.

Nudity and sex in Mitchell's 'art' - Cactus Kid Caught With a Nugget

I discovered this weekend that someone has created a link to this blog and labelled it as 'porn'.

I was a bit surprised. While my work includes sexual elements I wouldn't characterise it in this way. Many of my pictures don't even have nudity or sex in them and are no more erotic than the average boys comic book! Like the example below.

I'm not offended to be labelled in this way just surprised. I don't have too many illusions about the artistic quality of my work, it's meant to be entertainment not 'Art' but the porn label seems a pretty crude description. I try and keep this blog low key to maximise accessibilty. More exciting stuff is at my Yahoo! group (see sidebar for link)

The sexual act doesn't always feature in my pictures because I think the build up to it is often more interesting. There are so many explicit photo's available and so many talented photographers that I doubt I could add an original image. There doesn't seem any point in trying to.

For the same reason I usually let my characters keep some clothing on. I grew up in a time when nudity was not publishable so that's probably got something to do with it. However, I do feel that with a nude figure, whilst it can be beautiful and sexy, has no identity. The viewer can't connect with what is happening in the picture. Whereas if the figure is wearing something, all sorts of fantasies can be sparked and the viewer starts interacting with the image, not just passively viewing it.

I hope viewers get involved with my characters - it's what they were created for - to be carried off into the viewers mind and there take part in some erotic adventure. If only they could report back to me what had happened to them!

"Building site incident" by Mitchell

I've been looking through my unfinished sketches for material that might fill the gaps in the S&M Clinic story and I came across a little story board depicting a building site incident. Sometimes these unfinished items cry out to be set free! Then this picture popped up in my mailbox. He might have stepped right out of the picture story. Seems like an omen so I'm tidying up the drawings for publication to bridge the gap before the next S&M story goes out.

It's a fairly straight forward boy meets man story with a bit of bondage thrown in for spice. It's drawn in a comic format 6 frames to a page but I may split the pictures to create a narrative. The individual frames of course are less complex than my normal pictures. I'll be interested in the reaction they get.

I have a number of other stories in storyboard, comic format which will probably never get drawn as full size pictures as there are too many frames. These include a freestanding Neighbourhood Police Story and another on the S&M Clinic theme. Both follow a single character through their respective experiences with these organisations. I'm hoping these will go out towards the end of the year.

'Building Site Incident' will be published at mitchmen (yahoo group) in the next week or so.

Neighbourhood Police Story- latest (Jailbird detail)

The first part of Mitchell's Neighbourhood Police Story is now available as a PDF showing the original text combined with Mitchell's Artwork. The PDF is available in the files area of 'mitchmen' at Yahoo!

For those who missed it the story tells how Commissioner Hardman decides to tackle the law and order issues in Mitchville by instituting the '4S' policy:- Stop, Strip, Search and Secure. The Cops eagerly hit the street to implement the new tactics capturing and stripping known troublemakers and villains ready for transfer to the Jail. As the operation progresses however there are indications that the Cops have their own erotic ideas about the direction the operation should take.

This story resumes at 'mitchmen' later in the year and I shall probably rerun Part 1 as a prelude to the next installment.

In the next part of the series the thugs - stripped and tied up - start to find out what they are in for at the Mitchville jail

I've attached a little taster for you.

Scene setting for the new 'mitchmen' story - S&M clinic

I have now found a bit of space to get properly started on S&M Clinic - the opening picture is virtually complete and joins half a dozen others forming the core scenes. I've still not settled on the exact format of the story yet - it will essentially be open ended and there are lots of ways to assemble the scenes together.

The background to the story is as follows:-

The town fathers have decided in their wisdom that some menfolk are not looking after their health properly. A pilot project has been approved for selected men who live in the town to undergo a medical screening. Checks will be made on various aspects of the men's health and lifestyle and remedial action identified. If the pilot project is successful the process will be extended and repeated annually.

In order not to place a strain on public health resources the screening process has been contracted out to a private clinic. The successful bid was made by the Sporting and Military Clinic (known in the trade as 'The S&M Clinic'). This Clinic has specialised for many years in dealing with men from organisations who rely on high levels of fitness and health - they have health maintenance contracts with Rugby and Soccer clubs and local Army and Naval units for example. Naturally with this sort of clientele they are noted for their 'no-nonsense' approach. This appealed to the town authorities who are anxious to focus the new initiative on the sort of men who are normally reluctant to deal with these matters. The Clinic clinched the contract by offering to supplement the health checks with on-the-spot remedial actions.

Any day now letters will start arriving in 'male rich' households setting appointment times for their attendance for examinations the like of which they probably will not have experienced before...................

Watch this space for further announcements about Mitchell's 'S&M Clinic'