Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
“Collop Monday: pancake Tuesday: fruttis Wednesday, an hey for Thursday afternooin.”
‘Provincial Words in use at Wakefield’, collected by William Stott Banks, 1865.
‘COLLOP MONDAY, day before Shrove Tuesday.’, wrote W. S. Banks in 1865, ‘Children had a custom, and in some places have yet, of giving their School teacher bacon collops and eggs on this day. People thought no luck would attend them all the year if they did not dine on bacon collops this day.’
There are thirty-four individual drawings of hands and almost as many of the figure in this short animation, which lasts about four seconds.
It started off as a doodle of a man turning his head but moved further away from the cartoon original as I tried to get some expression into his face.
I drew it on my iPad Pro using an Apple Pencil in Clip Studio Paint EX. I’d been reading a tutorial about using Vector brushes so I’ve kept things simple and this has been drawn with the G-pen vector brush and the colour added on a separate layer using the Paint Bucket tool set to ‘Refer other layers’. As you can see here, the layers are treated as individual timelines in this program.
It’s usual to keep the timeline open for reference below the drawing but I might try my next animation with it above the drawing, because occasionally my hand would rest on a frame of the timeline and I’d find myself drawing on another cel.
I’ve got ‘Onion skinning’ turned on here. The blue outline represents the previous frame, the green the next frame.
Drawing all those individual frames of hands and faces has helped me get a feeling for the way the program works. It’s a time-consuming process but the traditional method of drawing every frame in an animation is closer to my sketchbook drawings than the previous methods that I’ve tried – such as Adobe Character Animator – which are often best approached as you would a cut-out animation.
After completing the animations based on my Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle, I’ve now turned to my 2011 paperback Wakefield Words based on Wakefield solicitor William Stott Banks’ 1865 collection of ‘Provincial Words in use at Wakefield. When I was working on the book, I enjoyed drawing the variety of subjects that he’d included. The pen and ink format is ideal for exploring various animation techniques that I want to try.
I’m surprised in this one that Banks records ‘toathre’ as meaning ‘two or three: a few’ as I would have thought it would have had the same meaning as ‘t’other’, meaning simply an alternative: ‘one or the other’.