Author: Richard

Alternative Lighting

alternative lighting on goose sketch

The next step on my Procreate animal illustration course is to take one of my thumbnail sketches and try it with three different lighting set-ups. I’ve gone for the light coming from the left, the right and from below (as if the goose had been caught in the beam from car headlights).

The one I like best is the light from above left and slightly behind, with a glint of reflected light from the bottom right.

angry goose sketch

Then it’s on to a rough drawing, not too detailed, but indicating the different areas of plumage.

Safari

Balloon safari cartoon

Happy birthday to Hannah.

Pop up balloon card (with elephants!)

As this is a big – jumbo-sized – birthday this year it’s a pop-up card.

making the card

The View from the Boathouse

Boathouse cafe

Just a taste (in this case a Bakewell and a latte) of the research that I’ve put into my article The bear, the bulldog and the boathouse, celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Boathouse at Newmillerdam, in the March issue of The Dalesman, out today.

Boathouse cafe

That chair is on the spot where sharp-shooting French bulldog enthusiast Lady Kathleen Pilkington (see article) sat 121 years ago in 1902.

My thanks to Experience Wakefield, www.experiencewakefield.co.uk for their support when I was researching this article.

Links

Dalesman website

The Yorkshire Dalesman

The Boathouse, Newmillerdam

Experience Wakefield

Newmillerdam Community and Conservation Association

Spring Flowers

Barbara’s brother John has seen the outside world just once in the last month on a brief wheelchair tour of the Hospice grounds so he asked us to photograph some of the spring flowers that are currently coming up in our garden.

The rest of the garden is ready for a bit of a spring clean but the crocus, daffodils, irises, winter aconite and pulmonaria give a welcome burst of colours.

The Pikachu Auditions

Pikachu cartoon
Pikachu

How can I do a birthday card for a Pokémon fan, Ted, when I don’t know anything about Pokémon?

By the way, the rodent above right is supposed to be a dormouse.

Dogtown

Dog town cartoon

A similar problem with Olive’s card, she’s a Bluey fan but I prefer terrier puppies in their natural colours (yes, they’re supposed to be little dogs, even if some of them look more like mice). Richard Scarry must have given himself more time when he drew his spreads of Busytown.

A Souvenir of South Wales

Bill's birthday card cartoon

And finally, happy birthday to my brother Bill yesterday. I’d forgotten how he got his good looks until I spotted this in my 1973 diary. Bill and I are one quarter Welsh so really no excuse for not predicting what the consequences of a rugby tour of South Wales might be. I think this was Rugby Union, although Bill also played Rugby League.

The 1973 diary extracts continue inside the card …

Inside of card

Miniature Sketches

I’m picking up again on Román García Mora’s Naturalist Animal Illustration with Procreate course and here we’re asked to work towards our final illustration by trying out miniature sketches of different poses of our animal or bird.

From the nine I’ve now got to choose three for my final spread. I’m intending to go for a flying goose top left, a main illustration bottom right facing into the page and somewhere in between, a small sketch illustrating some kind of behaviour.

I showed this to John – who is still surviving in the hospice – and he liked the aggressive goose in the centre and the one shown feeding in the water.

Library Windows

Library logo attempt
window

I’m designing a logo for the Friends of our local library, and Arts and Crafts style Carnegie Free Library and I’m struggling to get the precision I need for a simple graphic that can be reproduced at various sizes, including on a letterhead.

I’ve been learning all I can about Procreate and it should be simple to design it in the program but, as so often, my shaky hands are letting me down. For some projects I would welcome the wobble as it gives can make an intimidating facade look more friendly – and this is for a ‘Friends’ group after all -but I’ve decided to go for a program that enables even me to easily produce precise geometric shapes and I’ve gone to Adobe Illustrator.

But I might come back to Procreate for the finishing touches.

Colour Harmonies

John Carr

This looks like an Andy Warhol-style famous-for-fifteen-minutes portrait of John Carr but the idea is to come up with a colour harmony that will suit the Carr Tricentenary exhibit in the Redbox Gallery in Horbury.

Procreate colour harmony

Procreate includes a Colour Harmony Wheel so starting off with the colour of Yorkshire stone – the coal measures sandstone of St Peter’s Church – I’ve experimented with the various options available. Complementary does give me enough colours, Tetradic gives too many fighting against each other, so it’s the Split Complementary, Analogous and Triadic that are most likely to give me a workable colour scheme.

Procreate Butterfly

Procreate drawing

Saving half the work while drawing a butterfly; my latest Procreate drawing tutorial using symmetry in drawing assist. I’ve faded out the photograph of the peacock butterfly that I’m basing my drawing on so I’ve put in a reference image, floating in the top left hand corner, so that I can see the colours.

While I wouldn’t use symmetry drawing assist if I was out drawing with the iPad I am going to use it for a logo I’m designing which has to be strictly symmetric.

butterfly drawn in Procreate

Procreate also includes ‘Animation Assist’, which turns layers into frames and gives you a timeline and onion skinning (showing a faint impression of your previous frames).

Not sure what happened to the unfortunate butterfly’s dislocated left wing, but you get the idea.