Author: Richard

The Rotunda

We walked across the deer park to the Rotunda at Wentworth Castle this morning before heading up beyond the house to Stainborough Castle, built as a folly by Thomas Wentworth in 1731.

The bird highlight of the morning was before we set off, as we were packing the car. A woodcock flew up the road, flying about 8 feet above the centre road, as it would along a woodland ride. A few doors up it diverted between the houses, still at the same height, heading towards Coxley Woods. I’m guessing that it might have been hunkered down somewhere in the lower end of the woods but had been disturbed.

Brambly

Using a Fontself hand-drawn font in Apple Pages

I’m not familiar with Adobe Illustrator, so it’s been a bit of learning curve, creating this ‘Brambly’ font using the Fontself Illustrator extension but I’m gradually getting into the logic of it but once I’d done that the font was available to be used in any program, such as here on a newsletter template in Apple Pages.

I wouldn’t use it for text like this but I can see the possibilities. I’d like to try and create a typeface that resembled my regular sketchbook lettering but to get into the process it’s going to be more fun to try a series of more illustrative fonts, where readability isn’t the main concern.

Link

Fontself

Published
Categorized as Art Tagged

Butterbur

Butterbur and kingcups are in flower in a small stream or drainage ditch between the sewage works and the end Industrial Street at Horbury Junction. A fresh-looking peacock butterfly feeds on dandelions alongside the canal.

Fontself

drawing a typeface

The Fontself font creation program enables you to draw and scan a font or to draw each letter on the iPad as a vector image.

my first fontself font

What I’d like to do is draw the font on paper and then convert it to a vector font, as bitmap fonts are rather limited compared to regular fonts.

bitmap font creation

So far, I either end up with a bitmap font or an error message informing me that my particular version of vector image isn’t acceptable to Fontself.

vectorised image
Vectorised photograph, reduced to 26 colours in Adobe Illustrator for iPad

I’m sure that I’ll work it out and in the process I’m learning a bit about Adobe Illustrator, such as how to vectorise an image using ‘vectorize’ on the iPad version or ‘Image Trace’ on the Mac.

Link

Fontself

Adobe Illustrator

Wood Anemones

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.

Bunyard’s Exhibition

sowing beans

We’ve gone for a traditional variety, Bunyard’s Exhibition, for our broad beans which I sowed this morning.

leeks

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.

leek soup

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.

Villagers

villagers

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.

villagers

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.

mayor and curate
Monsieur le Maire

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.

Inky Folk

figures
Real G-pen and Wet Wash brush in Clip Studio Paint
comic script
Comic script template in Scrivener

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.

Poplar and Oak

poplar

A covering of snow this morning was a reminder that although we want to get ahead with our veg garden, it’s too early to plant out most of our crops.

Trees drawn from our morning coffee stops: an oak from Rivers Meet, Methley, and a poplar from the Coffee Stop at the Junction.

We were back there again this morning, walking alongside the river through a snow shower which soon gave way to blue skies and sun.

oak
Published
Categorized as Trees