Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Book Superheroes bursting into colour. Having familiarised myself with the storytelling suggestions in Stan Lee’s How to Draw Superheroes, I can now let these characters return to their secret hideout and get on with my other projects.
I drew my foot – in a Vivo Barefoot shoe – this morning as I waited at the hairdressers.
For my latest card, a guest artist. My niece Hannah drew a Black Dog on the Beach story with me when she was 5 or 6 years old. She’s since gone on, via a year’s work experience at DisneyWorld, Florida, to work in the travel industry, so I thought that it was time for update her original artwork for her birthday.
That’s me taking the part of the tourist.
The latest round of homemade birthday cards include this Scottish beachcomber . . .
. . . 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.
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.
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.
The gallery of sketchbook pages that I posted the other day reminded me of a comic strip. Haven’t worked out the story yet but the chair reminds me of a Sherlock Holmes story . . .
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’.
Also known as ‘The Haggis’.
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.
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.
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.
Still grappling with primitive geometric shapes in Clip Studio Paint.
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.
I’ve tried to get a screen print effect with the colour on my sketch of the pointsettia.
