Month: January 2022

Newmillerdam Circuit

Between the wars, for a period of 12 years, you could have boarded a Bradford-bound train at St Pancras (not Euston, as I’d previously written in this post) and travelled through this railway cutting at Newmillerdam. The Midland Railway opened this line in 1905 and it closed in 1968.

I’m walking the full circuit of Newmillerdam Country Park, keeping to the paths nearest to the edges of the woods.

Snaking ironwork is a local feature, which I’ve seen on the footbridge to the island at Walton Hall and on a balustrade on the side staircase at the Bingley Arms at Horbury Bridge. If the wavy spikes on this gate at Newmillerdam were supposed to warn off poachers from raiding the Chevet Estate, it didn’t work.

Sandstone quarry on the top of the slope beyond the Boathouse at Newmillerdam.
Published
Categorized as Drawing

3D Objects

3D objects drawn in Clip Studio Paint

In Clip Studio Paint, you can, as I have here, construct 3D objects from ‘primitives’ such as cubes, spheres and polygonal shapes or you can import ready-made objects such as the figure and the cart. I’ve followed these closely as reference, drawing in my normal pen and tone method on the iPad.

Not quite working . . . but I think that my character is over-reacting a bit.

The advantage of constructing a setting like this is that I could then have the figure walk around to the other side of the scene for the next frame in a comic, or even show a bird’s-eye view.

Published
Categorized as Drawing

Maris Peer

Maris Peer

We’re going for Maris Peer second earlies again this year but also trying some ‘ultra early’ Maris Bards. You have to buy them at this time of year as the popular varieties soon get picked over but we won’t be planting them until March or April, depending on the weather, so until then we’ll be chitting them: letting their shoots develop in a cool, light place (the back bedroom window sill).

Man and Dog

man and dog
Okay, I’ll admit it, the perspective is way out: eye level must be approximately that of the top of the sign post in the background, so this man is about 10 feet tall!

I used an line/tone conversion on a photograph I’d taken at Newmillerdam for the background for these characters drawn for a Clip Studio Paint Tutorial.

pointsettia

I’ve tried to get a screen print effect with the colour on my sketch of the pointsettia.

perspective
Trying the perspective ruler in Clip Studio Paint, in this case for a 2-point perspective.

Night Fox

fox

Caught on my Browning ProXD trail cam last night at 11.30 pm, this fox slinks into view on the path by the veg beds, pauses briefly to take a look at the camera and at something at the opposite side of the garden, then it trots off towards the crab apple.

Tulips

It’s not too early in the year to start some botanical drawings and I’ve learnt something even from drawing florist’s tulips: not all those ‘petals’ are actually petals. Tulips normally have three petals and, surrounding them, three sepals. Sepals are leaflike and enclose the flower.

Raising the Tone

gull cartoon strip

I remember Letratone, which consisted of rub-down sheets of screen tone. It was rather expensive and you needed to be a neat worked to use it effectively, so I never used it. Here’s the Clip Studio Paint equivalent, designed to reproduce well in print rather than to be viewed on screen, which is why there’s a checkered pattern in the tones in this version.

Night Visitors

The trail cam was still set to British Summertime, so this was 4.47 pm. Sunset was at 4.31 pm.

From the trail cam footage, it looks as if we’ve got a pair of wrens roosting. Last year when there was snow on the ground we estimated somewhere between 7 and 11 wrens roosting, all in the nestbox on the left. The nestboxes don’t connect on the inside.

As they settled down there was a lot of flitting between all three holes and the pair seemed particularly interested in the middle hole but they eventually settled on the hole on the left to roost.

Blue tit arrives at 8.41 am.

The last we see of the wrens on the trail cam is at 7.33 am when one of the wrens appears in the left hand hole and appears to be preparing to leave.

The blue tit arrives an hour later and makes a careful inspection of the first two nest holes, but doesn’t go in.

Gorilla Pod

gorilla pod

The roosting wrens are back, but how many of them are now crowding into the nestbox on the patio each evening? I’ve set up the trail cam, precariously mounted on a gorilla pod attached to Barbara’s dad’s cultivator which is fixed in the patio parasol stand, which itself it standing on the patio table.

Hope it works. At least my camera hasn’t put them off because as I write this just after sunset, Barbara tells me the wrens have already started to appear.

Drawn on my iPad in Clip Studio Paint, colour by the Clip Studio ‘colorize’ option. Not as camouflaged as the actual camera, but the cultivator does have orange prongs.