Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Last month I was interviewed in Vis News, the Visual Narratives Academy Newsletter, by David Haden, who writes:
This issue we interview a fine British comics maker and illustrator who clevely combines digital methods with traditional looks. It’s a long and informative interview.
Vis News, March 2022
You can download a PDF of the article below (and it looks good if you can view it as double-page spreads).
My brief, for this illustration of life in a castle, is to draw ‘someone using a well’.
Following the restoration of Pontefract Castle, there’s now a scheme to improve access and restore the ruins at Sandal. I’ll be illustrating various features including the twelve-metre deep well, excavated in the bailey, conveniently close to the privy chamber, the castle’s private apartments.
I’ve tried to imagine the kind of servant who would have been assigned the task of hauling buckets from the well. Although the shaft of the well has been preserved, we can only guess at the arrangement of pulleys or rollers that were used but I’m sure that it would have involved a bucket and rope.
I’ve drawn the character on my iPad Pro using an Apple Pencil in the Adobe Fresco drawing program but for the pose I’ve used a 3D figure in Clip Studio Paint, tweaking the pose and the proportions. I felt that he would have developed broad muscular shoulders because of all that heavy lifting.
I’m still at the rough stage but this should give the team designing the interpretation a clear idea of what I have in mind. Just fourteen more illustrations to go . . .
In the days before computers, I’d occasionally use a Polaroid camera to take a photograph of a friend in a particular pose or I’d establish the proportions by setting up an artist’s lay figure, an articulated wooden doll.
Both these methods had disadvantages: under my direction, the friend would be likely to adopt a static self-conscious pose and the lay figure inevitably looked stilted and wooden.
My favourite way to draw people is to go out with a sketchbook and to try to capture their movement and character.
I’ve got a bewildering number of virtual brushes available to me in Fresco including instant cross hatching and screen tones (left).
For the Sandal rough, after tracing the 3D figure with a virtual pencil, I’m going for a quick pen drawing – the one I used here is ‘vintage inks’.
The flat colour goes on a layer below the pen and ink. I outline each area of solid colour with a vector brush – such as ‘basic round’ – then fill using the paint bucket tool.
My first attempt at making a model after completing the basic tutorial in SketchUp.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could get through all your errands then, when you have a blank day, feel fresh and thoroughly inspired?
It doesn’t work like that for me. There’s plenty that I could do but nothing pressing so to celebrate the launch of a new version of SketchUp, the first in eighteen months, I’m dipping back into the program again. Mine isn’t the latest Pro version but the free version has plenty of possibilities.
I could argue that as illustration involves depicting three-dimensional objects in two dimensions it makes sense to explore all the possibilities. Playful experiment can feed into my regular illustrations in surprising ways.
It’s probably much more to do with my fascination for making models and creating imaginary worlds. I feel that we should all be allowed to do some things just because we enjoy them.
I’ve been through these tutorials before but it’s several years ago, so it’s been worth going back to first principles.
In the fourth and final part of the SketchUp basics video tutorials in which you get to construct a hall table, you get to grapple with such subtleties as tapering the legs, mirror imaging two of them to create the other pair and, the final touch, getting the drawer handles spot in the middle of the drawer front. There’s a trick to it.
Link; SketchUp
I MADE this zero calorie bar of chocolate using a recipe from Chipp Walters’ book Create 3D like a Superhero!, an entertaining introduction to the Vue 3D modelling program. A new – and free to use – version Vue Pioneer 11 is now available and having downloaded it I was inspired me to pick up the book and continue where I left a year ago.
My last Vue creation was Chipp’s Dolphin mini-submarine, but I remember struggling with the paint-shop part of the tutorial!
Link: Cornucopia 3D
I’M BACK in Bryce 7 territory as I trek my way through the basic tutorials to re-familiarise myself with the programme after a couple of years when I couldn’t get it working on my machine. The last time I went through this tutorial, using Bryce 4 in 2004 (left), I added a few rocks to the lake shore. The rendering of the scene has improved, making the most of the capabilities of my new computer. I’m almost ready to supply the images for a National Geographic article.
I’M BACK on this now rather familiar alien world, as this is the fourth time that I’ve worked through John Kennedy’s introduction to Bryce, the natural landscape-generation programme. His article, published in PC Format magazine 13 years ago this month, includes a step-by-step alien landscape tutorial. A full version of Bryce 2 was included on the cover CD.
Until now, I haven’t been able to run Bryce successfully on my computer. I went for a new machine a couple of years ago when Windows 7 came in but, despite tentative assurances that that you’d be able to run your old programmes under the new operating system, my existing 3D design programmes were never able to run successfully.
Now Daz have made a PLE version of Bryce 7, the latest version, available as a free download. PLE stands for Personal Learning Edition but this is a full version with no limitations other than it’s not for professional work. This gives me a perfect opportunity to get to know the programme and, if I do decide to use Bryce for an illustration – a historical reconstruction, for instance – in one of my books, I can easily upgrade to the professional version, which is reasonably priced.
So far, it works fine on my Windows 7 64 bit computer. The render time for the final image takes seconds rather than minutes. As you can see from this image (left) from previous occasion, back in 2005, when I went through the tutorial the results of my new set-up, using Bryce 7, are impressive.
Bryce versus SketchupSketchup makes it simple and intuitive to design anything ‘from a house to a coffee pot’ but I think, looking at this chair tutorial (right) which I completed yesterday, you can see why, as an illustrator with an interest in geology, history and wildlife, I don’t find it as attractive as Bryce.
For me Bryce offers more exciting possibilities and, as it is now 13 years since I first tried it, it feels comfortingly familiar to use.
Link
Bryce 7 PLE download at CNET.