Continuing with my Clip Studio Paint portraits, this is our niece Joanne from a ballpoint pen sketch that I made in the summer of 1984. I’ve closely followed the original because when I tried to elaborate details – for instance by adding a highlight to the eye – I found that I soon lost the expression that I’d caught in the quick sketch.
I’d describe that look as quizzically skeptical and it’s one that I associate with her late mum, Margaret, who, when I came out with some half-baked statement, would raise an eyebrow and ask:
“Do you think so?”
We were lucky to meet up with Joanne and her husband Paul recently, shortly before the advice to adopt social distancing. A week later the restaurant we’d met at was closed, along with all the other restaurants and bars across the country.
With all bars and pubs now closed until further notice, this Clip Studio Paint illustration was based on a pen and wash sketch from four or five years ago. As usual, as a drawing, I prefer the original sketch but I love the process of constructing a comic-style illustration, particularly when it gets to the final stage of dropping the tones in with the paint bucket tool.
I’m now onto the final part of my Clip Studio Paint Tips for Digital Outlining! tutorial by Eridey. I’m following a step by step demonstration of how to draw a female comic book character but basing my version on a 1985 sketch of Ruth, a communication design student at Leeds Polytechnic. I’m attempting to replace my tentative pen and wash with the graphic style of the tutorial, so my character is getting jet black hair instead of the fair hair of the original Ruth.
This is unfamiliar territory for me, so I’ll probably try working up several different sketches of people to get the feel of the process. Ultimately, I will use the techniques in my own way but first I want to understand how comic strip artists go about achieving their crisp and confident style.
I start with the G-pen, drawing the face and then, on a separate layer, the outline of the hair.
Blocking in
Next stage is to fill in the outline of the hair using the paint bucket tool. I draw the hands on another layer, on top of everything else, but initially you can see through to the layers below, so I need to create a layer mask, which in effect cuts a hand-shaped hole in the hair. It’s a technique that I’ve never used before, so that’s something new that I’ve learnt from going through the tutorial.
My original sketch
I then add individual strands of hair. The highlights are drawn using the G-pen loaded with transparent ‘ink’, rather than opaque white, so it’s like cutting into the area of black as you would when drawing on scraperboard.
Finally, on a base layer, I add tones of grey using the paint bucket tool. The simplified tones make me think of printmaking. But the original sketch is probably still my favourite!
Continuing with my Clip Studio Paint line drawing tutorial, this exercise, again closely based on an example in the Tips for Digital Outling! tutorial by Eridey, is intended to show how a thicker line can suggest that a subject is in the foreground.
The figure and the landscape are taken from two sketchbook drawings. The landscape is line for line like the original, except that I moved the house, which would have been hidden by the figure.
The man with the bag was a lightning sketch of a passer by but I had to change the perspective as my composition required a low viewpoint. As I firmed up details from the quick sketch, he became more of a countryman. With those hills behind him, I couldn’t help thinking that he might be a character in a James Herriot story.
It’s good to see the display boards are now in place at Sandal Castle, including my illustrations on this panel on the bailey which overlooks the barbican, drum towers and keep. I like the contrasting styles by the five artists who have each illustrated a panel. In my photograph you can just make out Liz Kay’s board – a bird’s-eye view of the castle in its heyday – which has been set up on the viewing platform on top of the keep.
We called at Sandal this morning to see the panels and, for once, there wasn’t a stiff breeze blowing up over the ramparts! A dunnock was singing its rather rushed, jingly song from a fence post as we walked across the bridge to the bailey.
My ‘Sandal Castle Guide’
Yes, there’s a Robin Hood connection with Sandal, this booklet features a walk around the castle.
You can still see damage from the Civil War siege.
The castle had its own kitchen and bakehouse.
A team of oxen and horse yoked together were used during the construction of the castle.
The well-preserved sally port was blocked long ago.
We have accounts of exactly what foods were stored in the castle’s larder.
Our coffee table, which always has a pile of magazines and books on it. I’m currently reading through Walt Stanchfield’sDrawn to Life, but this drawing is another in the Digital Outlining tutorial by Eridey which I’m following, thinking about how using a thicker line might draw attention to the subject of a comic strip frame. Eridey features a similar comic strip frame as an example in the tutorial, so I’ve done my own version, to try out the technique for myself.
According to John Ruskin in The Elements of Drawing, any variation in line is to be frowned upon – in his opinion it doesn’t add anything to the drawing itself – but animator Walt Stanchfield’s approach is that anything that helps a drawing tell a story is a good thing.
I love going through tutorials and as this one, a Clip Studio Paint tutorial, Tips for Digital Outling by Eridey, is especially appealing as it is more about drawing than technical details. My spheres have turned out wobbly and I know there’s a way around that, but that isn’t the point of the tutorial, it’s just the line drawing that we’re interested in here:
“The outline is a fundamental part of the illustration, sometimes it can be frustrating, especially when we see that our sketch looks better than the final version.”
For three weekends running we had named storms sweeping in over Britain, causing widespread flooding, including here in the Calder Valley, so the weekend before last, when it turned calmer and milder, we started thinking when would the frogs reappear in the pond. Right on cue, later in the day we spotted a few males, waiting for the females to arrive.
By the end of the week there were about twenty clumps of frogspawn in the sunnier, shallower corner of the pond which is always the favourite with them.
They’d finished for this year by the 12th March, when I took this photograph. Down at the bottom left corner of the clumps, a male smooth newt was performing his tail-wafting dance for the female. The mating season for newts goes on for weeks.
I’ve been compiling a list of my publications over the last 25 years. I didn’t realise that I’d been so productive.
Around Old Horbury 1998 £2.95
Around Old Ossett 1998 £2.95
Waterton's Park 1998 £2.95
Thornes Park 1999 £2.99
Sandal Castle 2001 £2.95
Malham Magic 2002 £2.95
Yorkshire Rock 1996 £6.50
High Peak Drifter 2006 £6.00
Mist Over Langsett £3.99 2004
This Distant Northern Sea 2004 £3.99
Dales Way Diary 2004 £4.99
Saints & Serpents 2004 £4.99
The Normanton Chronicles 2004 £4.99
Four Corners of Horbury 2004 £4.99
Rough Patch 2005 £10.95
Drawing on Reserves 2008 £4.99
Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle Second edition 2010 £3.99 (out of print)
Walks around Horbury 2007 £2.50
All Sort of Walks in Liquorice Country 2010 £2.99
Walks in Robin Hood's Yorkshire 2010 £2.99
Walks around Ossett 2011 £2.50
Walks around Newmillerdam 2007 £2.50
Wakefield Words 2011 £3.99
A Sketchbook of the Natural History of the Country Round Wakefield 1979 Out of Print
Richard Bell's Britain 1981 Out of Print
Deep in the Wood 1987 Out of Print
Village Walks in West Yorkshire 1998 Out of Print
Having brought all those together, I’ve added four books that I wrote and illustrated between 1979 and 1998: A Sketchbook of the Natural History of the Country Round Wakefield, Richard Bell’s Britain, Deep in the Wood and Village Walks in West Yorkshire. All my other publications were as illustrator only or, on two occasions, as writer only.
Every character who walked into the Farm Shop Cafe made me think that I’d like to try animating them. I’m currently reading Walt Stanchfield’sDrawn to Life, based on a long-running series of drawing classes that he arranged for Disney animators, inbetweeners and clean-up artists. My aim here was to try to catch gestures, which Stanchfield describes as mini-stories. His method is rather like the way that I attempt to draw people walking by: getting an instant impression of the whole pose and character. I think of it as taking a mental photograph, a test of memory, but Stanchfield wants us to develop the storytelling elements suggested in the pose, costume and character in that instant.
Having tried animating in Clip Studio Paint EX on my iPad Pro, I now feel much more at home using it for the much simpler process of designing a comic strip. Putting my random sketches into the frames of a Clip Studio comic strip immediately gets me thinking what could the story be here, even though I know these four people had no connection with each other. I added each pose to the frames at random, just to fill the grid that I was drawing as I went along.
The only conscious connection that I imposed was adding the bearded man to fill the left-hand side of the letterbox frame. That implied a conversation with the coffee-drinking man already occupying the right-hand side of the frame. I turned the eyes of the characters towards each other but resisted the urge to add word balloons, I’ll experiment with that in another sketchbook comic strip.
Note that, on Stanchfield’s advice, I’ve at last gone back to my sketchbook. This one is A5 portrait format; my pocket sized A6 sketchbook isn’t big enough for quick random sketches. I’d soon find myself running off the edge of the page.
