Category: cartoon

Inks

inks
Actual drawing 2.25 x 4 inches, 6 x 10.5 cm.

My pen project continues but I thought that the inks ought to make an appearance today. The ’20 ounce’ bottle of Super Quink red ink was redundant stock that my dad brought back from the office c.1970. It still works fine. The Chinese ink in the attractive blue-and-white bottle was something that I tried when I worked on my monochrome sketchbook published as High Peak Drifter. I made four dilutions at different strengths which I took on my travels to simplify adding the tone.

Daler’s FW Acrylic Artists Ink goes back to my Yorkshire Rock days. I remember buying two shades of blue when I drew an underwater spread of ‘Life on the Reef’ for the Carboniferous Limestone section of the book. This bottle was Sepia, my go-to colour for most of the line work.

The Special Red is Pelikan Drawing Ink, from the 1970s. The one with the blue cap is Winsor and Newton Calligraphy Ink, the Burnt Sienna behind it is Rotring Drawing Ink. Bringing up the rear on the right, are plastic bottles of Stephen’s and Horse stamp pad inks.

The Crime Writer’s Pen

fantasy pens

My latest fantasy pens include a gardener’s pen, complete with dibber and garden twine, a crime writer’s pen which will keep CSI busy for days and a walking pole pen which includes compass, pedometer and even and emergency supply of Kendal Mint Cake.

Bee Hotel

bee hotel cartoon

The card shops and National Trust gift shops have yet to reopen so I’m still producing homemade birthday cards, this one celebrating a birthday and a very successful bee hotel. The day our friend John Gardner finished constructing it and put it in place, several solitary bees moved in.

cat cards

Meanwhile the numerous cats who wonder through our back garden provide material for cards, including these two characters. When it came to a showdown, ‘Bear’ through bluster and body language had no trouble seeing off the smaller ‘Wildcat’ tabby.

The McGuffin

cartoon strip

With apologies to Alfred Hitchcock, this comic strip was inspired by the variety of fly masks that our local ponies are now wearing and a rather striking turnout rug that one pony was wearing a week or two ago, before the weather warmed up.

Ponies, sheep and a couple of donkeys graze in the pastures around our local camping store, Go Outdoors, which is currently in lockdown. They stock selection of pony blankets, stable rugs and rain sheets, so I might have to draw a cartoon of my two pony characters going in there and using the fitting rooms and full-length mirrors.

In the final frame in the original version of this comic strip, I had the McGuffin-clad pony extolling the virtues of his outfit with wide-eyed enthusiasm, but this made it look as if he was delivering the punch-line to a joke. I made some minor adjustments to the eyes and the corner of the mouth in an attempt to make him look as if he really thinks that his outfit gives him suave sophistication of a Roger Moore character.

Link

Go Outdoors: pony blankets available online only, so at the moment you can’t go in with your pony to try before you buy.

On the Nose

Stable Relationship

The second cartoon strip inspired by the ponies we pass on our regular morning walk. In the final frame, I’m getting pretty much the look that I had in mind. I decided not to go for shadows this time. I like the simplicity of flat colours.

Colour set, Clip Studio

Talking of flat colours, in one tutorial (see link below) I discovered that you could not only save swatches in a ‘Colour Set’, you can also name them.

Link

Making Comics for both Print and Webtoons Clip Studio Paint tutorial by SimonWL

SimonWL Comics

Cat Card

Cat Card

What we must expect now that the card shops have gone into lockdown: my lightning-sketch birthday cards are quicker and cheaper than going into town for the bought version . . . just not as slick and sparkly, but it’s the thought that counts.

This is Boris (thought he was called Basil, but, sorry Boris, I’d got that wrong), the cat that thinks that he owns our back garden.

A Stable Relationship

A Stable Relationship

I used the iPad version of Clip Studio Paint for this comic strip. In reality, the Shetland Pony has now dispensed with its pony blanket, although another pony in the field has taken to wearing a pink pony blanket and an insect shield hood over its face and ears. There’s probably another comic strip in that pink pony blanket.

Basil

comic

Another doodle, drawn to help me get familiar with the basics of creating a comic in Clip Studio Paint. This is from page one of an eight-page comic, but this is as far as it’s going, as I’ve already managed all the basics by adding characters, background, speech bubbles, call-outs and even a 3D object.

Basil is a neighbours’ Persian cat with Siamese markings who wanders ponderously through our garden and occasionally makes a run at the birds at the feeder. He flounces across the lawn towards them like a frantic feather duster, so the birds spot him long before he gets in pouncing distance. I like him as a potential comic character, but he’s a bit too close to Garfield at the moment.

Party Folk

party folk
at the bar

With all bars and pubs now closed until further notice, this Clip Studio Paint illustration was based on a pen and wash sketch from four or five years ago. As usual, as a drawing, I prefer the original sketch but I love the process of constructing a comic-style illustration, particularly when it gets to the final stage of dropping the tones in with the paint bucket tool.

Ruth

Ruth
original sketch

I’m now onto the final part of my Clip Studio Paint Tips for Digital Outlining! tutorial by Eridey. I’m following a step by step demonstration of how to draw a female comic book character but basing my version on a 1985 sketch of Ruth, a communication design student at Leeds Polytechnic. I’m attempting to replace my tentative pen and wash with the graphic style of the tutorial, so my character is getting jet black hair instead of the fair hair of the original Ruth.

This is unfamiliar territory for me, so I’ll probably try working up several different sketches of people to get the feel of the process. Ultimately, I will use the techniques in my own way but first I want to understand how comic strip artists go about achieving their crisp and confident style.

I start with the G-pen, drawing the face and then, on a separate layer, the outline of the hair.

Blocking in

Next stage is to fill in the outline of the hair using the paint bucket tool. I draw the hands on another layer, on top of everything else, but initially you can see through to the layers below, so I need to create a layer mask, which in effect cuts a hand-shaped hole in the hair. It’s a technique that I’ve never used before, so that’s something new that I’ve learnt from going through the tutorial.

My original sketch

I then add individual strands of hair. The highlights are drawn using the G-pen loaded with transparent ‘ink’, rather than opaque white, so it’s like cutting into the area of black as you would when drawing on scraperboard.

Finally, on a base layer, I add tones of grey using the paint bucket tool. The simplified tones make me think of printmaking. But the original sketch is probably still my favourite!

Drawn to Life

line drawing

Our coffee table, which always has a pile of magazines and books on it. I’m currently reading through Walt Stanchfield’s Drawn to Life, but this drawing is another in the Digital Outlining tutorial by Eridey which I’m following, thinking about how using a thicker line might draw attention to the subject of a comic strip frame. Eridey features a similar comic strip frame as an example in the tutorial, so I’ve done my own version, to try out the technique for myself.

According to John Ruskin in The Elements of Drawing, any variation in line is to be frowned upon – in his opinion it doesn’t add anything to the drawing itself – but animator Walt Stanchfield’s approach is that anything that helps a drawing tell a story is a good thing.