All the right ingredients. Latest birthday card for Emma, a food analyst (and I bet that you can’t buy such a job-specific card in the shops, even when they open again next week).
Eye Test
Category: cartoon
Hen & Pencil
After the unpredictable floppy rabbit’s ears in my last animation, I decided to try a pencil stage with this alarmed chicken.
This wasn’t drawn directly in pencil in my sketchbook as suggested here – although a flick-book would be fun to try – it’s the pencil tool in Clip Studio Paint. I shall now move on to the inking stage.
Scroll Work
‘Is that all it does?’ asked Barbara. It takes a lot to impress some people, doesn’t it?!
I’m re-learning hand-drawn animation using the timeline in Clip Studio Paint on my iPad Pro, drawn with a second generation Apple Pencil.
I got the chance yesterday to run through a LinkedIn course created by animator Dermot O’ Connor. He kept things really simple using Photoshop – simple if you’re already familiar with Photoshop that is. My problem is that I don’t find it easy to draw using a graphics pad and so far the timeline isn’t available on the iPad version of Photoshop.
Big Birthday
More March birthdays. This first one is totally unfair to Uncle Bill and to the innovative ‘funky grooves, 80s synth and jazzy piano a go-go’ sounds of Tom’s brother’s indie rock band but the ‘Scotsman playing Baker Street on the trombone’, was an actual incident at a wedding in Edinburgh, which I remember it well: very difficult to forget, actually!
The big birthday recently has been my brother-in-law John. For the past year because of restrictions, he’s been grounded in South Ossett, so Illingworth Park has been his regular exercise walk. Three times around the park is one mile, so during that time we calculate that he’s walked about 300 miles around the park and another 300 getting to and from it, so the full distance of the Pennine Way and back again, with just about enough mileage left over to complete The Dales Way too.
My first version of John’s card included the regular dog walkers and the occasional mums and children who we see in the park, but I thought the numbers would make more of an impact if the park was empty. I added ink washes to establish the tones but this dulled the watercolour wash that I put over it, so I drew the card again.
Ali is brilliant at sewing and was able to run up some stylish face masks in the early days of lockdown when they were in short supply.
When Garden Birds Turn Bad
It’s been a busy month for birthday cards, this one inspired by my niece, Sarah, who in real life really appreciates the bad boids visiting her feeders.
Cheesy Grater
Catching up with birthdays today and this character has a walk-on part on one of my homemade cards. Not surprisingly he’s soon asked to walk-off again.
Cliff Card
A card for a beachcombing marine biology enthusiast (he lives not far from The Deep, which I’ve yet to visit).
The Deflated Duo
Yes, I think we all know the feeling. Although this homemade card has a post-Christmas theme, it’s actually for my niece Hannah’s birthday, earlier this week. Based on a real life incident, when Hannah and Sam’s blow-up Santa in the front garden got switched off when an electrician was working on their kitchen. The penguin was unaffected.
By then these Christmas characters had become a feature of life on the avenue and a little boy was quite alarmed to see Santa lying there, but his mother was suitably reassuring.
The Carpenter and the Cow
Oh dear, it looks as if the game is up for our plucky little tenon saw. If there’s a moral to this folksy fable from Yes it is, it’s never put your trust in an even-toed ungulate.
Manic Moth
We all know that moths are the unsung nightshift of ecosystem services, busy pollinating and recycling while we sleep, so these days it’s not often that one of them, in this case the humble clothes moth, gets to play the pantomime villain.
Another illustration for the PG-rated children’s storybook Yes it is, or OH NO IT ISN’T! in this case. Manic Moth: “Oh! Yes it IS!!!!“
I thought that I’d nailed it and created a moth that looked as scary as Nosferatu the Vampire but coming back to it he’s more closely related to Peter Firmin’s Nogbad the Bad. I think it’s to do with the way he walks, which would work well as a cut-out animation.