Category: Drawing

Villagers

villagers

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.

villagers

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.

mayor and curate
Monsieur le Maire

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.

Inky Folk

figures
Real G-pen and Wet Wash brush in Clip Studio Paint
comic script
Comic script template in Scrivener

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.

Scilla

scilla

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.

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Categorized as Drawing

Bicycles

Cafe YumYum, Brewery Wharf, Leeds

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.

View of W H Smith’s from Pizza Express, Albion Place, Leeds

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.

More bicycles this morning at the Rivers Meet Cafe, Methley.

Prehistoric Animals

prehistoric animals

You couldn’t accuse me of lacking in ambition. As a seven year old my first attempted book project was to write and illustrate Prehistoric Animals, my own take on the history of our planet.

plans for a museum
My plans for a Prehistoric Museum, which I reckoned was ‘not hard to make’.
My homemade dust-jacket for one of my favourite books, Prehistoric World by Carrol Lane Fenton.

I enthusiastically drew Tyrannosaurus striding past a tree fern. So far, so good, but now for the difficult bit. With my wobbly lettering the text was going to be a challenge.

‘Tyrannosaurus,’ I wrote and – phew – I got the spelling right, but then I continued: ‘had 200 theet.’

In my efforts to produce my neatest writing I’d misspelled ‘teeth’.

Tertiary era title page
I never got further than the title page for the Tertiary era.
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Categorized as Drawing

Boris Romantschenko

Boris Romantschenko

Boris Romantschenko, a survivor of the Buchenwald, Mittelbau-Dora, Bergen Belsen and Peenemünde concentration camps, who died aged 96 during Russian shelling of his apartment block in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv on Friday.

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Categorized as Drawing

Holmfield Beech

Holmfield beech

In Holmfield Park, adjoining Thornes and Clarence Parks in Wakefield, this old beech has so far escaped damage in storms. So many beeches in the area are getting to that 150 to 200 year old stage when they start shedding boughs. Let’s hope that this one still has decades of life left in it.

sandstone wall
rose

On Saturday we met up with family at the Holmfield Arms, in Holmfield House, a Victorian mansion which was once gifted to the city and housed the local museum.

The cross-bedded sandstone is the wall of what is now an orangery style room in the Brewers’ Fair restaurant. It overlooks a terrace surrounded by shrubs and trees, including a lime (lower left on my sketch above). Varieties of lime that grew in a columnar shape were popular with the Victorians.

I drew more Victorian trees in Horbury. Some of these are getting to the end of their natural lives and have shed branches, or on the odd occasion been blown down in storms.

Jenkin Road, Horbury

Remember Where You Are

bird calls cartoon

For my brother-in-law John’s big birthday plus one, a cartoon of our regular walk around Newmillerdam, which would be a quiet place if it wasn’t for all that birdsong and – on her My Yorkshire show last week – Jane McDonald singing Jessie Ware’s Remember Where You Are on the slope behind the Boathouse.

Nats AGM sketches

The Wakefield Naturalists’ Society had their first AGM since the pandemic on Monday but it was a case of blink and you’ll miss it, as the main event of the evening was Ron Marshall talking about Ardnamurchan, the Outer Hebrides and the Shetlands.

sketches at John's

These sketches were drawn with a Lamy nexx with a B – bold – nib. I’m getting towards the end of my bottle of De Atramentis, an ink which soon dries, allowing me to add watercolour.

Fentiman’s Gently Sparkling Elderflower

Marigold Seeds

Drawing marigold seed heads

We bought a pack of uni ball Signo gel pens, designed specifically for writing, so naturally I had to try one out for drawing these marigold seed heads.

marigold seed heads sketch
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Categorized as Drawing

VisNews

Vis News cover

I’m delighted to have made it onto the cover of this month’s Vis News, the Visual Narratives Academy Newsletter.

Vis News spread

‘This issue we interview a fine British comics maker and illustrator,’ writes editor David Haden, ‘who cleverly combines digital methods with traditional looks. It’s a long and informative interview.’

Vis News

My comic strip experiment for this month’s Dalesman didn’t make it into print – editor Dan Clare and I decided that Dalesman readers would prefer a more traditional format for the nature diary! – so I’m delighted that Vis News has featured the strip and the process that I went through in creating it.

Vis News

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