Category: cartoon

Bilberry Comic Spread

comic spread

The final panels drawn, hand-drawn borders added and a hopefully subtle paper texture added. Hope my editor likes it but, if not, I can soon adapt it to a regular nature diary format.

Natural Colour

comic strip squirrel

The flat colour that I like for my figures and cartoon animals doesn’t suit the straightforward natural history I’m including in the comic, so I’ve gone for gentler watercolour effect in Clip Studio Paint. As the colour is on a separate layer from the line drawing it’s easy to start again with a fresh layer to try alternatives.

Colour: Flat or Fuzzy?

colour

Adding flat tone, texture and colour: as this is destined for an A5 sized page, flat tone might work better than subtle effects, but for now I’m leaving these frames as they are. If any one of them stands out as looking out of place on the final spread I can go back to it.

Chris and Fiona

Chris and Fiona cartoon

Chris and Fiona get the cartoon treatment in the final panel of ‘Bilberry Wood’. For colouring I’ve discovered a useful new (to me) tool in Clip Studio Paint, the ‘Direct Draw, Lasso Fill’.

Ruskin on Drawing Trees

Ruskin

A special guest artist in the Bilberry Wood comic today: instead of drawing my version of Ruskin’s illustration from Elements of Drawing, I dropped in a scan of his original.

Darwin

But I redrew Charles Darwin’s sketch of his Tree of Life. This is the inking stage, colour to follow.

Bilberry Inks

Inking comic page

I’m at the inking stage, drawing with my Apple Pencil on the iPad Pro, using the ‘Real G-Pen’ in Clip Studio Paint for images and lettering. I’m trying different styles, so I’ve gone from a cartoony approach in panel 2 to something a bit freer and messier in panel 3. I’ll decide which I like when I see the final coloured version.

Bilberry Rough

page layout

I’ve dropped the speech bubbles, panels and frames into the layout of page 2 of the Bilberry Wood comic. All that I have to now is draw the final artwork . . .

Chaucer & Co

Bilberry Wood comic rough

I spent the morning researching connections to Chaucer, Ruskin and Darwin for my Bilberry Wood comic strip but it’s not a thesis, it’s a double-page spread comic, so I’ve roughed out some ideas to work out how I’m going to fit it all in.