Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
I’m practising using the 3D drawing figure in Clip Studio Paint – a kind of virtual lay figure – keeping to the standard body shape but developing the character through its actions and costume. I’m going for a limited range of tones because it’s the form of the character that I’m interested in, but I look forward to adding colour, which I can do later on another layer, over the tonal layer but beneath the line drawing.
Still grappling with primitive geometric shapes in Clip Studio Paint.
Between the wars, for a period of 12 years, you could have boarded a Bradford-bound train at St Pancras (not Euston, as I’d previously written in this post) and travelled through this railway cutting at Newmillerdam. The Midland Railway opened this line in 1905 and it closed in 1968.
I’m walking the full circuit of Newmillerdam Country Park, keeping to the paths nearest to the edges of the woods.
Snaking ironwork is a local feature, which I’ve seen on the footbridge to the island at Walton Hall and on a balustrade on the side staircase at the Bingley Arms at Horbury Bridge. If the wavy spikes on this gate at Newmillerdam were supposed to warn off poachers from raiding the Chevet Estate, it didn’t work.
In Clip Studio Paint, you can, as I have here, construct 3D objects from ‘primitives’ such as cubes, spheres and polygonal shapes or you can import ready-made objects such as the figure and the cart. I’ve followed these closely as reference, drawing in my normal pen and tone method on the iPad.
The advantage of constructing a setting like this is that I could then have the figure walk around to the other side of the scene for the next frame in a comic, or even show a bird’s-eye view.
A confused Great Dane attempts to take a drink from the pond below Joiners Wood. On the Lower Lake mallards and a single mute swan have gathered in the one corner that is still ice free. A shoveler drake and two females rest at the edge on the ice.
By midday the sun has got out and the expanse of white parkland in front of the house has turned green, with just a few frosty patches remaining in the shade of trees.
The low winter sunlight was perfect for macro photography, so I took my Olympus E-M10II fitted with a macro lens to Newmillerdam this morning.
The flat colour that I like for my figures and cartoon animals doesn’t suit the straightforward natural history I’m including in the comic, so I’ve gone for gentler watercolour effect in Clip Studio Paint. As the colour is on a separate layer from the line drawing it’s easy to start again with a fresh layer to try alternatives.
This Sketchboard Pro, which arrived this afternoon, is a big improvement on the drawing board propped up on an offcut of decking that I’ve been using.
To test it out, I drew one of the frames for my Bilberry Wood comic. It holds the drawing board at just the angle I like and it’s so robust that it doesn’t slip around slightly, like my previous makeshift arrangement.
I’m enjoying adding the colour, and I think the flat colours are going to work. The Ruskin panel will be just 7 cm (2.75 inches) across, so, as I said yesterday, it shouldn’t be too fussy.
Darwin’s fossiliferous strata in this panel remind me of when I worked on Yorkshire Rock, and make me think about tackling something in similar style.
After so much drawing on the iPad, it’s a good feeling to go back to pen on paper in my pocket-sized sketchbook.
Low winter sun and a sprinkling of snow bring out the colours of the winter walk at RHS Harlow Carr Gardens.
The red and orange stems of dogwood glow against the dark of the conifers.
But perhaps because it was so cold, I couldn’t pick up any scent from the spidery red blossoms of a wych hazel.