The final animation in the Cartooning book and this time it’s getting quite ambitious, constructing a dinosaur from separate pieces of artwork, so it will be animated like a cut-out shadow puppet. I look forward to seeing how it works out but I like it at this stage, in its component pieces. It reminds me of plastic dinosaur construction kits. In the mid-1970s I had to supply illustrations for John Man’s The Day of the Dinosaur. I bought all the dinosaur kits that I could find and presented them to my brother Bill who was recovering from appendicitis. Being the caring brother that I am, I also supplied him with the appropriate plastic enamel paints and got him to paint them too. I’ve still got all the models.
Continuing with the simple animations from the Cartooning book, here’s an exercise in shape changing. Hissey and Tappenden didn’t specify that these mysterious events should be taking place above the little town of Horbury in the Calder Valley, but why not? This is a Shape Tween in progress.
Adobe Animate Shortcuts
As with any Adobe software, you can speed up your workflow in Animate by learning the keyboard shortcuts and Hissey and Tappenden include a helpful list (in Flash, but the keyboard shortcuts have been retained in Animate). Getting really familiar with these by sticking a few labels to my Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Keyboard also helps me grasp the basic workings of the program.
Another simple animation from The Professional Step-by-Step Guide to Cartooning by Ivan Hissey and Curtis Tappenden. This is about as simple as animating gets: one layer is the paper background, then there’s the puppy, minus its left ear, and finally the ear itself, pivoting up and down on an anchor point on the puppy’s head.
You convert the ear into a Symbol and the book mentions that in Flash you can store as many as 16,000 symbols in the library! Probably more now that Adobe has replaced Flash with Animate, but I intend to keep things as simple as possible. One Symbol is a start though.
After quite a break I’m launching myself back into animation with this tutorial from The Professional Step-by-Step Guide to Cartooning by Ivan Hissey and Curtis Tappenden. Writing in 2010 they used Adobe Flash but I’m using its replacement Adobe Animate.
Take a break, keep fit, Mattias Adolfsson advises us on his Art of Sketching course . . . and draw some exercises suitable for illustrators.
It’s a while since I’ve tackled graphite and certainly I’m not ready for H pencils yet.
I can just about manage HB.
The problem is that I’ve spent too long working with pens.
I was never cut out to be a pencil pusher.
I remember the rare pleasure of being appointed pencil monitor at school. With all thirty of the class’s pencils to sharpen there was a tendency for us to push the machine to its limits and turn too fast, result: broken leads. This meant you had to start over and the pencils rapidly decreased in size.
I’m better sticking to what I’m used to, but I’m drawing so much that I’m regularly having to top up my Lamy Vista with De Atramentis ink. Quite a workout and I have to mop up the mess with paper napkin afterwards. Perhaps I should go back to cartridges, you just pop them in and you’re ready to go.
‘Draw your first teacher’ is the next prompt from Mattias in the ‘Memory Lane’ section of his Art of Sketching course.
I remember a surprising amount of details of the first couple of terms of my school life, in Mrs Clegg’s class at Wrenthorpe Infants, but we moved to Horbury before the end of the year and my sister Linda and I started at Clifton Infants, a newly-built school at the far end of Manorfields Estate.
Clifton Infants School
Go in the main entrance and turn left and you’d find yourself in Mrs (or Miss?) Birdhouse’s class.
Mrs Wallis‘ class was nearest the school entrance, overlooking an oak tree and, beyond the school grounds, ‘The Reck’, Green Park recreation ground. In my sketch Mrs Wallis is holding a couple of the large, light greyish, wooden building bricks that we used. I remember building a model church with them and surrounding it with smaller wooden bricks to represent gravestones. I was into history even in my second year at infants school.
The teacher holding the flash card had the classroom that faced you as you came in the main entrance. Unfortunately, I can’t remember her name. This was my penultimate class at Clifton. She’d made several of these flash cards, on sheets of sugar paper, each with a photograph from a magazine stuck at the top to give us a clue what the first word was as she held them up for the whole class to read. One sheet had just one word in place: “You like this one don’t you?!” she chuckled as she held it up. I believe that she was the teacher who specialised in music and, now that I’m remembering a bit more about her, I think that she had darker, longer hair than I’ve shown. She drove a car, which resembled a smaller version of the Austin Princess. The bonnet reminded me of the Rolls Royce. I remember this because she explained musical notes – minims, crotchets and semibreves – in terms of children, adults and her in her car, making their way to school.
Finally Miss Marsh, our final class teacher, who became headmistress during my time there.
The latest in my Art of Sketching course and Mattias has asked us to draw a favourite toy from childhood. This dates from when we lived at Wrenthorpe, so I guess that I would have been about 4 or 5 years old.
A disk harrow might seem an obscure object of desire but for children at that time agricultural implements were probably the equivalent of diggers today. We lived on Ruskin Avenue, a suburban road of then newish houses, but there was a field between our back garden and the railway embankment, so an assortment of agricultural machinery used to trundle down our road towards the field entrance a few doors on.
And talking of agricultural machinery, I remember being mystified by this snippet of conversation from my first year at the Infants school at Wrenthorpe:
The Bottle-top Tractor
I’m guessing that there must have been a foil-recycling charity appeal, to raise funds to buy tractors for some war-hit country but I remember puzzling over an image of my friend assembling a tractor using the milk bottle tops he’d collected.
Mrs Clegg’s class, Wrenthorpe Infants, 1955
I drew these before reaching for the photograph album and I’m pleased to see that I wasn’t too far out with fashion trends. Tank tops are due for a comeback. I think that it was the confident-looking boy in braces, top left, standing right behind me, who told us about the tractor scheme. He’s evidently got so much confidence that you could believe him if he said that’s what he was doing.
Mrs Clegg’s classroom, the old school building, Wrenthorpe Infants, 1955.
From the indoor informal portraits, I can see that the photographer had guessed that I’d grow up to be the sort of guy who spends a lot of time in coffee shops. I like the way the focus is on the anxious-looking girl waiting in the Wendy house. Glad that I dressed for the occasion: a tie and a tank top.
Still on the ‘just keep drawing’ prompt from Mattias Adolfsson’s The Art of Sketching course, I was beginning to run out of abstract shapes as a starting point for my drawings. The abstract curves that I started off with suggested a roof or a tent and by the time I drew in the stone steps and circular base I found myself thinking about a stage set; one with a revolving stage.
For the characters that might inhabit this desert base, I was thinking of an opera, perhaps a Philip Glass production, but inevitably in setting it in the 1930s or 40s I’ve ended up with Indiana Jones stereotypes. Although the zookeeper with the camel, if drawn in Hergé’s ligne claire style, could have a walk-on role in a Tintin adventure.
An Elephant Seal of Torquay,
was desperate to swim in the sea :
But he couldn't reach,
the far end of the beach,
'cos the crowds had invaded Torquay.
Edward Lear seems to be contagious. A friend of mine composed three limericks for the parish magazine and now she finds she can’t help slipping into limerick mode.
My elephant seal offering was inspired by a page of Edward Lear-style punning cartoons posted by ‘have_pen_will_draw’, who like me is tackling Mattias Adolfsson’s The Art of Sketching course. His other punning creations included ‘tiger shark’, ‘bull frog’ and ‘horse fly’.
I’m lucky enough to have a copy of Edward Lear’s Book of Nonsense, which helpfully has every verso page left blank, so that I could slot in my cartoon in Photoshop. I’m particularly pleased that I was able to almost match Lear’s choice of typeface by using the typeface Didot.
If only I could match the inky spontaneity of Lear’s drawings!
