Category: cartoon

Digital Colouring

Digital colouring

I like the printed look that you get using flat colours so I’ve been going through a tutorial on digital colouring. It should work well in my printed publications.

You scan your pen and ink drawing in black and white drawing at 600 dpi, using the ‘text’ setting. This is to avoid the slightly fuzzy ‘anti-aliased’ edges you’d get using the regular 300 dpi colour or grayscale settings. In Adobe Photoshop you can then go to the Channels palette (above) and press that first button at the bottom of the palette ‘Load Channel as Selection’.

Invert the selection and, on a new layer and fill with the foreground colour. For a comic strip you’d fill with pure black but here I’ve filled with brown.

Lock this line art layer you’ve created add the flat colours on separate layers, with shading, as on the wall in my top illustration, on another layer.

grayscale version of the illustrations

I tried the ‘Load Channel as Selection’ with my finished colour version then, after inverting it as before, filled it with black, producing this grayscale version.

Felix Natalis

hedge trimmer cartoon

Rumours soon spread that ‘The PhantTOM Topiarist’, a.k.a. ‘The Latin Banksy’ was one of the masters at the local Academy.

hedgetrimmer advert from Gtech
Pixelated image of the alleged ‘Phantom Topiarist’.

Happy birthday to Richard.

On the Bonnie Banks of Loch Bogle

camping cartoon

Birthday card for an outdoor enthusiast.

animals cartoon

Hope he’ll feel just as enthusiastic bright and early the next morning.

African animals

Meanwhile, on the plains of the Serengeti, a biodiverse gathering for another recent birthday.

Published
Categorized as cartoon

Inky Workings Out

pen, chinese ink and brush

I’m experimenting with pen and ink and Chinese ink and brush, partly to free up my drawing but also because there’s a possibility of an inky project coming up over the next few months.

Werewolves

It involves Victorian werewolves, so a pen with a Victorian nib would be appropriate and Chinese ink is unpredictable enough, especially in my hands, to add some gothic texture and mystery to the drawings.

werewolves

I can’t work out how a werewolf could wear a top hat but I don’t think a character like the sly fox Honest John in Disney’s Pinocchio is the way to go. I’ve been reading Isabel Greenberg’s Glass Town and The One Hundred Nights of Hero and I think something more in the realm of graphic illustration and European folk tales would suit the subject but I’ve also been reading up on Nick Park’s Wallace and Gromit so I’m not discounting something more homely.

Pen, ink and brush drawing my Vivo Barefoot shoes.

Sound Advice

recording a handwritten poem

Rather than sit at the computer dubbing in the lines of each character in my Ode to a Duck, I set up a makeshift recording studio and Barbara and I each read through the whole poem, with just a few out-takes. As I’m taller than Barbara, I moved the drawing board up to the next shelf for my read-through.

makeshift recording studio

I thought that it would sound better if we stood up, rather than record it sitting in my office chair. To cut down on any slight reverb we might get from the bare studio wall behind us, I hung a blanket over a clothes horse on top of the plan chest. The wall of books absorbed any reverberation from behind the microphones, which, by the way are iRig Lavoisier (snapped up in the sale when Maplins was closing down a couple of years ago).

soundtrack
Final verse (you can see there are a pair of rhyming couplets) selected, which I read in its entirety, as there’s just one character, the ‘desolate duck’ in the final scene.

In Adobe Audition, I cut and pasted each rhyming couplet, then used that for each of the characters in the film, Barbara and I reading alternate couplets.

Pike an Perch

After all the trouble that I’d gone to to avoid reverb, I added an echo effect to the grim warning given by the Pike and Perch in the penultimate verse.

Link

Ode to a Duck on YouTube