Category: cartoon

Beachcomber

beachcombing cartoon

The latest round of homemade birthday cards include this Scottish beachcomber . . .

Santa and his dog cartoon

. . . and this Santa and his dog cartoon. Yes, it is a birthday card but it’s based on my great nephew Ted’s design for a card for the University of Hull, which featured his fantasy pet dog, Fudge, delivering presents with Rudolph. I’ve got competition.

family photograph

And finally, for my brother Bill’s card, I dug out this Kodachrome of Bill, Dad and I with Vache the springer spaniel from a day out at the small lake where my dad used to go fishing at Terrington near Castle Howard in what is now North Yorkshire.

I’m the good looking one.

Published
Categorized as cartoon

Rainy Morning

Rainy morning sketches comic strip

Drawing indoors and in a rainswept car park: this morning’s rain meant that we didn’t get off to Newmillerdam. I was looking down on the cars at the same angle as I was looking down on the piles of books and CDs on the shelf under my brother-in-law’s coffee table, so they look like a couple of models.

Tattie & Neeps

Tattie and Neeps cartoon

The Tattie & Neeps Mysteries and it looks as if our hard-boiled inspector and his rookie sidekick D.C. Neeps might have made a breakthrough in tracking down ‘Mr Big’.

Haggis cartoon

Also known as ‘The Haggis’.

Tattie and Neeps cartoon birthday card

Yes, it’s birthday time again, and this is for Rob, a vegetarian ex-detective living on a Scottish Island. I think that I’ve discovered a demographic that even Moonpig and The Card Factory haven’t latched onto yet.

“Was D.I. Tattie one of the original ‘Peelers’?” asks Rob.

Figures

figures

I’m practising using the 3D drawing figure in Clip Studio Paint – a kind of virtual lay figure – keeping to the standard body shape but developing the character through its actions and costume. I’m going for a limited range of tones because it’s the form of the character that I’m interested in, but I look forward to adding colour, which I can do later on another layer, over the tonal layer but beneath the line drawing.

Gothick Colour

Clip Studio Paint/ Photoshop coloured comic frame

I’ve gone for Gothick with this Clip Studio Paint iPad drawing. 3D-drawing figure posed in Clip Studio (I’m getting the hang of how the joints work). I added flat tones in Clip Studio then used the Magic Wand tool, Fill and a gradient for the background.

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.

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.

The Big Dig

Big Dig cartoon

Birthday card for an archaeologist/organic gardener. Based on actual events (no, not the bit where Prof. Roberts identifies the variety of potato).

Moral: always let the guy who’s doing the rotavating where you’ve planted the potatoes.