Category: cartoon

Remembering Karen

Naturalists
Wakefield Naturalists’ September field trip to St Aidans.

We’ve been saddened to hear of the untimely death of a member of Wakefield Naturalists’ Society, Karen Nicklin, who also – as in my cartoon – volunteered at the RSPB St Aidan’s reserve.

“As a really keen walker and hiker, Karen spent time planning and undertaking walks that combined nature and the landscape and I remember well the talk she gave recently at our members’ evening when she wowed us with views of the spectacular scenery and wild flowers from a recent trek in the Austrian Alps.”

John Gardner, President, Wakefield Naturalists’ Society, wakefieldnaturalists.org

It’s just three weeks ago that we last saw her on that pre-‘Rule of Six’ Naturalists’ field trip to St Aidan’s. As she served me a socially-distanced shade-grown coffee (shade-grown saves trees) afterwards, I asked her what the news was from the Loch Garten ospreys. She replied that, because of Covid, she’d missed out on volunteering there for the first time since 2004. She told me that she hadn’t even managed to add an osprey on her year list. She was obviously missing them, and we’ll miss her.

Best of the Bunch

Tomato folk

The Alicante is supposed to be flamenco dancing. It’s difficult to get a tomato to look convincingly as if its flamenco dancing. I decided to limit the props for each variety to footwear. Obviously Tigerella has got those tiger feet.

The greenhouse looks like a jungle that has been lashed by tropical storm but we’ve never had a better year for tomatoes. As I was drawing the bowl of our beef and small plum tomatoes, I tried to draw each as an individual character. The calyx – the little crown of bracts – on each tomato was rather like a top-knot, which got me thinking about making them into cartoon characters.

tomatoes

Orville the Octopus

Orville the Octopus

Another birthday card, this one inspired by real-life events (no, not that event, Orville doesn’t really work for Boris).

New Class at the Woodland School

Woodland School
Summer is over, it's turning cool,
It's time to go back to the Woodland School . . .
Owl seems to be sleeping, but I've a hunch,
He's dreaming of Dormouse for his lunch.
Just one missing, and that's the Mole,
Whoa! Here he comes now, popping up from his hole!
Woodland School greetings

A birthday card for Florence (she’s the one in the woolly hat).

Into the Woods

rough sketch

In a total contrast to yesterday, Storm Francis has arrived this morning and is lashing fairly gently on the studio window, so I’m settling down to some homemade birthday cards. This, as usual, will be in in pen and watercolour but I like the pencil as it is. I wouldn’t normally start with a pencil rough but it probably saves time in the long run and gives me an opportunity to have second thoughts: for instance, I decided that I’d drawn the fox too large, so I’ve rubbed him out and he’s more in scale with the other characters.

My original plan was to go for woodland invertebrates but I felt that the hedgehog should be central (she was originally going to be the teacher in a school photograph) so I stuck with woodland mammals plus a sleepy tawny owl lurking on the back row. By the way, it really is sleeping, not casually looking down at that well-fed dormouse and thinking ‘that’s lunch sorted’.

Walking the Duck

This animation was a way of getting more familiar with onion skinning and using the Light Box in Clip Studio paint so it’s turned out to be a bit of lame duck because, having drawn the 12 frames needed for one half of its waddle, I didn’t feel that I needed to continue to complete the second half of the step. If I was starting again, I’d pay as much attention to the sway of its body, which is such a feature of ducks waddling along.

Superheroes

The regular superheroes were all busy, but . . .
A partly animated version of a homemade birthday card.

Deep in the Dales

Nethergill

We’re looking forward to visiting the Dales again next month, but a Covid outbreak at the Wensleydale Creamery at Hawes means that even our postponed break could potentially be in question.

This homemade card is for Sue, who regularly joins us at Nethergill with her husband Roger. Sue celebrated a ‘big’ birthday last year but remembering us getting together for a spot of un-social distanced country dancing in their local village hall seems like something from a different world.

Dinosaur Animation

At last, I’ve got to the end of my Cartooning Animate Tutorials by working out how to get a couple of pteranodons gliding through my scene. Not quite in the way described in the tutorial but at this stage I’m just pleased to have got it to work. Having established the principles, I should be able to do something more creative.

The Monster Book

Perhaps I should have left it in it’s component pieces as in my previous post, but no, I just had to see it animated.

As previously, this is animated using Adobe Animate but the set up here is slightly more complicated as each component – arm, jaw, leg – is a separate Movie Clip Symbol on a separate layer.