Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
This opium (not Himalayan) poppy had seeded itself on one of the veg beds, so I’ve transferred it to my plants for pollinators bed and it seems to be settling in.
This foxglove rosette will be relocated too, when we put in the runner beans and dwarf French.
Last month I was interviewed in Vis News, the Visual Narratives Academy Newsletter, by David Haden, who writes:
This issue we interview a fine British comics maker and illustrator who clevely combines digital methods with traditional looks. It’s a long and informative interview.
Vis News, March 2022
You can download a PDF of the article below (and it looks good if you can view it as double-page spreads).
I’m reading Shawn Martinbrough’s How to Draw Noir Comics so I’m on the look out for seedy characters and bleak urban settings on the mean streets of Methley and Birstall.
He suggests that you should take photographs of characters, cars and ‘still lives’ – plants, tables and chairs. Set the camera to black and white because that gets you looking for compositions in dark and light.
There were several diners in Pizza Express who would have made suitable characters but I didn’t have the nerve to ask them if they’d mind being photographed and opted for a discrete sketch instead.
I used the ‘Image Trace’ function in Adobe Illustrator on my iMac to convert my pen and ink drawing of a sofa into a vectorised image. On a layer below I used the pen tool and – my new favourite – the blob brush to add a few areas of solid colour.
You can then re-colour the image either by changing colours individually or selecting the whole image and going for an alternative scheme from a colour theme library. Here I’ve used ‘Pop Art’, ‘Prehistoric’ and ‘Ice Cream’ (the one in chocolate and pistachio).
I converted this sketch of our shed in the snow in Illustrator for iPad. Instead of ‘Image Trace’ there’s a very similar vectorise function, which can convert it into something nearer to a woodcut or lino-cut.
I’ve just read Marcos Mateu-Mestre’s tale of medieval mercenaries, ‘Trail of Steel’, so I’ve tried to put a bit of his swashbuckling mayhem into my drawings of a sofa, a cruet and various piles of books and CDs.
I’ve been doing so many birthday cards recently that I’ve run out of De Atramentis black so I’ve moved on to the brown.
I drew this trackside junction box from a photograph in Adobe Illustrator. There’s a lot more planning involved in the process and mapping out shapes with the pen tool seems more like cutting shapes for a collage than drawing.
So far manipulating anchor points on the outlines of shapes seems rather random to me. I find it easy to inadvertently delete an anchor point and lose a section of the shape. Converting between an anchor that results in a straight line and one that results in a curve seems equally obscure.
The only way that I’ll learn is to keep practising.
In Framed Ink 2, Marcos Mateu-Mestre suggests that the shape of the frame in a comic can help tell the story. This Clip Studio Paint sketch is a rough idea for the scene from The Book of Were-Wolves where the traveller, Sabine Baring-Gould, arrives at a small village in search of a pony and trap and meets the local curate and the village mayor.
I’ve drawn them as full figure character sketches but for this scene it’s the reaction of Monsieur le Curé and M. le Maire to a mysterious traveller that we’re interested in so we could got into letterbox format and make the traveller more mysterious by only including part of the figure.
When it comes to the discussion between M. le Curé and M. le Maire about how to deal with the traveller’s request I could go for a square head to head panel of just the two of them.
And when we meet Monsier le Maire for the first time he might merit a panel to himself, with a vertical format to show the full figure.
Inspired by Marcos Mateu-Mestre’s Framed Ink, I’m going for a livelier, inkier look for my comic based on Sabine Baring-Gould’s The Book of Were-Wolves.
Rather than launch straight into drawing, I’m starting with a script, using Antony Johnson’s Comic Script Format template in Scrivener.
I’ve used Scrivener for writing articles for years, but always using a plain ‘Basic’ template, which isn’t very different to using a standard Microsoft Word document but Scrivener can do a lot more than that. The Comic Script Format makes it more like using screenwriting software, such as Final Draft.
We have mixed success with bulbs but a few of the iris made it into flower and the scilla seem to have settled in.
Snowdrops are the bulbs that have really made themselves at home, spreading behind the pond and along the hedge and tête-a-tête daffodils do well too. They’ve lasted for a month or more but are now fading away.
It’s not set to last over the weekend but it felt like being in a continental city in Leeds yesterday, sitting sketching a bicycle on Brewery Wharf at the Cafe YumYum.
It was our first day browsing around Leeds since just before the first lockdown, so it was good to feel things getting back to some kind of normality.
