Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Hoof fungus, also known as tinder bracket, Fomes fomentarius, on silver birch and wood anemones at Newmillerdam this morning. I headed via the Arboretum, through Kings Wood, down into the Lawns Dike valley and up through Bullcliff Wood to the top end of the lake.
We’ve gone for a traditional variety, Bunyard’s Exhibition, for our broad beans which I sowed this morning.
Last summer a fox family flattened our leeks. I harvested the last of them today but didn’t get much off them as they were starting to produce tough flowering shoots. We planted a second crop so I used a couple of rows of those instead.
They were smaller but perfect for leek and potato (and celery and pea) soup. Barbara found a leek and cheese muffin recipe on the internet.
In Framed Ink 2, Marcos Mateu-Mestre suggests that the shape of the frame in a comic can help tell the story. This Clip Studio Paint sketch is a rough idea for the scene from The Book of Were-Wolves where the traveller, Sabine Baring-Gould, arrives at a small village in search of a pony and trap and meets the local curate and the village mayor.
I’ve drawn them as full figure character sketches but for this scene it’s the reaction of Monsieur le Curé and M. le Maire to a mysterious traveller that we’re interested in so we could got into letterbox format and make the traveller more mysterious by only including part of the figure.
When it comes to the discussion between M. le Curé and M. le Maire about how to deal with the traveller’s request I could go for a square head to head panel of just the two of them.
And when we meet Monsier le Maire for the first time he might merit a panel to himself, with a vertical format to show the full figure.
Inspired by Marcos Mateu-Mestre’s Framed Ink, I’m going for a livelier, inkier look for my comic based on Sabine Baring-Gould’s The Book of Were-Wolves.
Rather than launch straight into drawing, I’m starting with a script, using Antony Johnson’s Comic Script Format template in Scrivener.
I’ve used Scrivener for writing articles for years, but always using a plain ‘Basic’ template, which isn’t very different to using a standard Microsoft Word document but Scrivener can do a lot more than that. The Comic Script Format makes it more like using screenwriting software, such as Final Draft.