Continuing with my Clip Studio Paint portraits, this is our niece Joanne from a ballpoint pen sketch that I made in the summer of 1984. I’ve closely followed the original because when I tried to elaborate details – for instance by adding a highlight to the eye – I found that I soon lost the expression that I’d caught in the quick sketch.
I’d describe that look as quizzically skeptical and it’s one that I associate with her late mum, Margaret, who, when I came out with some half-baked statement, would raise an eyebrow and ask:
“Do you think so?”
We were lucky to meet up with Joanne and her husband Paul recently, shortly before the advice to adopt social distancing. A week later the restaurant we’d met at was closed, along with all the other restaurants and bars across the country.
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.
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!
Continuing with my Clip Studio Paint line drawing tutorial, this exercise, again closely based on an example in the Tips for Digital Outling! tutorial by Eridey, is intended to show how a thicker line can suggest that a subject is in the foreground.
The figure and the landscape are taken from two sketchbook drawings. The landscape is line for line like the original, except that I moved the house, which would have been hidden by the figure.
The man with the bag was a lightning sketch of a passer by but I had to change the perspective as my composition required a low viewpoint. As I firmed up details from the quick sketch, he became more of a countryman. With those hills behind him, I couldn’t help thinking that he might be a character in a James Herriot story.
Our coffee table, which always has a pile of magazines and books on it. I’m currently reading through Walt Stanchfield’sDrawn 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.
I love going through tutorials and as this one, a Clip Studio Paint tutorial, Tips for Digital Outling by Eridey, is especially appealing as it is more about drawing than technical details. My spheres have turned out wobbly and I know there’s a way around that, but that isn’t the point of the tutorial, it’s just the line drawing that we’re interested in here:
“The outline is a fundamental part of the illustration, sometimes it can be frustrating, especially when we see that our sketch looks better than the final version.”
“Collop Monday: pancake Tuesday: fruttis Wednesday, an hey for Thursday afternooin.”
‘Provincial Words in use at Wakefield’, collected by William Stott Banks, 1865.
‘COLLOP MONDAY, day before Shrove Tuesday.’, wrote W. S. Banks in 1865, ‘Children had a custom, and in some places have yet, of giving their School teacher bacon collops and eggs on this day. People thought no luck would attend them all the year if they did not dine on bacon collops this day.’
There are thirty-four individual drawings of hands and almost as many of the figure in this short animation, which lasts about four seconds.
It started off as a doodle of a man turning his head but moved further away from the cartoon original as I tried to get some expression into his face.
I drew it on my iPad Pro using an Apple Pencil in Clip Studio Paint EX. I’d been reading a tutorial about using Vector brushes so I’ve kept things simple and this has been drawn with the G-pen vector brush and the colour added on a separate layer using the Paint Bucket tool set to ‘Refer other layers’. As you can see here, the layers are treated as individual timelines in this program.
It’s usual to keep the timeline open for reference below the drawing but I might try my next animation with it above the drawing, because occasionally my hand would rest on a frame of the timeline and I’d find myself drawing on another cel.
I’ve got ‘Onion skinning’ turned on here. The blue outline represents the previous frame, the green the next frame.
Drawing all those individual frames of hands and faces has helped me get a feeling for the way the program works. It’s a time-consuming process but the traditional method of drawing every frame in an animation is closer to my sketchbook drawings than the previous methods that I’ve tried – such as Adobe Character Animator – which are often best approached as you would a cut-out animation.
“Welcome to the Rhubarb Kitchen! “Today we’re making my all time favourite rhubarb recipe, a rhubarb version of the classic baked cheesecake. “It might be very calorific but our local-grown forced rhubarb really is something to celebrate.” My cartoon animation from Wakefield’s Rhubarb Festival features Barbara’s recipe and Karen Chalmer’s music.
After finishing my Rhubarb Festival animations, I realised that it was time for me a bit more about animation. I’m enjoying reading The Animator’s Survival Kit by Richard Williams but thought that I’d understand it better if I tried some of the animations that he suggests for myself. This bouncing ball animation took just minutes to film but it took a while for me to find the most effective way to convert the sequence of images into an animation. After trying the timeline in Photoshop and in Adobe Animate, I eventually settled for importing as an image sequence into Premiere Pro.
My studio setup was a precariously balanced iPad and my subject was a 1797 twopenny piece on the studio floor. Appropriately Richard Williams’ hefty Survival Kit provides the necessary gravitas.
