Category: cartoon

Drawing Rhuben

Just in case you were wondering how I conjured up my cartoon character, head gardener Rhuben Cushstead, here’s the inside story, as seen in a timelapse video of the whole process of drawing in Adobe Fresco, from importing some of my sketchbook drawings to create the scene in the Rhubarb Patch, to isolating elements of Rhuben, such as his left forearm, for my animation.

The video lasts one minute. If only I could work at that speed!

In the next section of my video, I’ll draw portraits of Prophet Wroe and Adam Hood, forester, who will then introduce their own corners of the Rhubarb Triangle.

Camel Train

At last I’ve got those camels actually walking across the Gobi Desert. This is another Adobe Animate scene for my rhubarb animation, drawn in Adobe Fresco on my iPad Pro.

Marco Waves

Before I add Marco Polo himself to this scene of a lush growth of rhubarb in the mountains of Tangut, China, I wanted to perfect the waving hand, which in Adobe Animate is a Movie Clip symbol. Having animated the waving hand symbol, the movement is added to the cartoon as a Motion Tween.

Marco’s arm won’t be moving across the screen but my next Motion Tween challenge is two of Ghengis Khan’s camels laden with rhubarb, so I wanted to start with something simple.

Rhubarb Titles

Here’s the rough cut version of the titles of my Brief History of Rhubarb animation. There’s lots of little improvements I could make to this but I need to see the whole two or three minute film first before I get into those final touches.

Like so many wildlife photographers, I’ve gone for a bit of slow motion in my opening shot of a mammoth discovering that rhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid and other chemicals as a defence against grazing animals. The slow motion wasn’t deliberate, but I’m still getting used to the timeline in Adobe Animate.

The Rhubarb Patch

Rhubarb Patch

Having sorted out such knotty issues as the mammoth’s trunk, I’m now turning my attention to the titles for my Rhubarb Festival animation. This suitably homespun title introduces the section where we meet the head gardener, Rhuben, leans over his garden gate to talk rhubarb.

Mammoth Task

Animated GIF: the final animation will be an HD mp4

As a change from Character Animator, I went to another Adobe program, Animate, for the mammoth sequence. There’s a tool that adds a mesh to my drawing, so that I can deform the shape from frame to frame. Also very useful is that if I bend the trunk on frame 25 of a sequence it will add a smooth transition. When I worked on Watership Down we had key animators, who drew the start and finish of the movement of a character and other animators who filled in the gaps, a process known as tweening.

Once I’d mastered the techniques of tweening and warping the mesh, I then had difficulty bringing the whole thing together. My final lesson was that everything: the mammoth’s trunk, its right ear, its left ear and even the tusks, which don’t move at all, needed

Rhubarb Sketchbook

sketchbook

I’ve got most of my Brief History of Rhubarb animation in the can and all the artwork completed but I’m still working on the scene where a man picks up glass of rhubarb aperitif. It’s a surprisingly tricky bit of animation to get right but I’m determined not to fudge it and ‘cheat’, so hopefully I’ll get it to work smoothly over the weekend.

In the meantime I’m planning my next animation for the Rhubarb Festival Richard Bell’s Rhubarb Triangle Sketchbook.

My storyboard (above) gives the gist of it, a sketchbook brought to life, with the drawn characters, such as a Middleton collier, telling the story themselves. I’ll then pan around the page for close-ups of relevant pen and watercolour drawings.

storyboard

I’m using picture maps and pen and watercolour drawings that I drew for my booklet Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle, so I’ve got plenty of material to choose from to tell my story and conjure up an impression of Rhubarb Triangle country.

The Elusive Glass of Zucca

Rabarbaro Zucca

A man walks into a bar, not just any bar, this is the famed Zucca’s Bar in Milan, and orders the speciality, Rabarbaro Zucca, a rhubarb-based aperitif. But he’s out of luck, I’m only halfway through the tutorial on how a character picks up an object in the Adobe Character Animator tutorial, so he’s going to have to wait until tomorrow to finally get that drink.

The Rhubarb Express

My latest animation: the Rhubarb Express from Ardsley Station in the heart of Rhubarb Triangle, taking forced rhubarb to London.