Perspective can be a bit of a struggle but, according to Italian comic artist Pietro B. Zemelo in a recent Clip Studio Paint webinar, ‘you can’t go wrong’ with the perspective ruler. I have gone wrong actually as I didn’t plot my vanishing points in quite the right place when trying it out on my iPad, but it’s a lot of fun to use.
I wonder if I could draw a set of steps . . .
Links
Tips for Constructing Comic Pages with Clip Studio Paint webinar on YouTube. He also explains the mysteries of the ‘Lock transparent pixels’ button – something that I’ve never dared mess with – and explains the difference between the ‘Divide frame border’ and ‘Divide frame folder’ tools.
Harvey is our joiner Simon’s border terrier, so I got another chance to draw him today as work on our new bathroom continued.
Harvey likes two things: to watch the world go by and to find a warm spot to settle down in, so our patio windows are a favourite for him; sometimes snoozing with head hidden behind the curtains for bit of extra seclusion.
This small, delicate-looking fungus was growing under deciduous trees, on a sparsely grassy verge by the track around the lake at Newmillerdam Country Park. They remind me of the little folded-paper parasols used to decorate a cocktail but this isn’t the parasol mushroom.
The caps in the background appear to be the older ones and, like the inkcap that I drew the other day, they are turning black around the gills, although I suspect that these aren’t closely related.
The young wild boar is learning fast, perfecting its ability to turn up in the wrong place and cause a bit of a stir amongst the herd. It’s a wild boar’s survival strategy to push its snout into everything, so this is good practice.
I would have assumed that the big male boar would be in charge of the herd but he doesn’t seem to get his way with the sows, who emphatically stick up for themselves with a lot of outraged vocalisations.
In this iPad drawing from a photograph, I’ve limited my colours to three mid-tones, finishing off with a darker shadow version and an off-white tone for highlights.
My pen and watercolour wash drawing is just a couple of inches across. I soon realised that I should have had a better light on such a dark subject. When I bought the camera, I could have chosen the model in silver but, on the rare occasions when I’m photographing a subject behind glass, the black doesn’t show up in reflection.
How is it that sheep, as soon as you stop to photograph them stop behaving naturally and give you that ‘what are you doing?’ look before bounding away.
This is obviously one of this year’s lambs and its tail hasn’t been docked.
Common inkcap at Newmillerdam. This one had been knocked over, revealing that its gills were turning to ink. Drawn on my iPad from a photograph taken with my Olympus Tough.
Well, one French yogurt pot of pens and two treacle/syrup tins plus an olive and a baking powder tin of them.
A few years ago, I couldn’t walk past a stationer’s or an art store without going in to see if they had an interesting pen for me to try. Today I’m happy with my TWSBI Eco T fountain pen so I stick with that, which probably is Eco-friendly, as – locally for us – all those single-use pens can’t go in the regular recycling and apparently end up in an incinerator, although Douglas Adams put forward the theory that missing ballpoint pens slip through a wormhole into an alternative dimension.
As usual, I’m using Noodler’s waterproof ink and Winsor & Newton watercolours.
The September Dalesman magazine just dropped through the door and I’m delighted with how my Wild Yorkshire nature diary has turned out this month. The drawings have a bit more room to breathe than usual and the daisies and germander speedwells, photographed in Thornes Park this summer, give a suitably relaxed frame for my Pink Pig A5 sketchbook.
As usual the lettering and drawings were dropped in later, as it would be so difficult to get the exposure just right for each element.
Sketchbook v. Notebook
I’ve been using the sketchbook format in my articles for a year now but starting in the new year, we’re going to try something different as it so difficult to tell a story in the few paragraphs of hand-written text that can be comfortably fitted in amongst my drawings.
I’m hoping that I can still keep some of the quirkiness of the visual joke of popping a sketchbook down on the turf or on the beach, so perhaps I’ll go back to my regular text and illustrations for the diary but incorporate some element like a real feather or fossil resting on the page or a ladybird crawling across it.
A Curious Cat
September’s issue of the Dalesman is, as usual, full of all things Yorkshire: the Wakefield’s Mystery Plays, Leeds Library (wish I lived nearer, I’d join), the dolls houses of Newby Hall and bird of prey conservation.
And yes, also as usual, my sketches are upstaged by watercolours and oils from Yorkshire’s artistic talent –John Harrison’s Healaugh and Chris Geall’s Mallyan Spout – but my favourite image in this issue is Stephen Garnett’s double-page spread photograph of a back alley in Robin Hood’s Bay village.
How did he manage to find that comically curious cat which so perfectly matches the sun-dappled stone of the cobbles and cottages?
I love the printmaking effect that I can get by converting one of my sketches into a vector graphic in Adobe Illustrator CC 2018. I’ve reproduced this image at almost its full screen size (the original sketch is much smaller) because I didn’t want to soften it by reducing it too much.
I’ve downloaded the program this morning as part of my year’s subscription to Adobe’s Creative Cloud and I’ve been going through the beginner’s tutorials as it’s so many years since I last used Illustrator.
I’d never come across the option to automatically trace a scan or a photograph of a drawing and turn it into crisp black and white vector artwork. I immediately started thinking of how I might use that in my work.
George-a-Green, the Jolly Pinder of Wakefield, before and after vectorisation.
For instance, I’m currently working on a historical article for the Dalesman magazine and I feel that vector graphics could give the effect of a woodcut. Even after a lot of practice, I’m more used to drawing with a pen than an Apple Pencil, so this might be an effective way of combining the freedom of drawing with the graphics effects available on the computer.
In both of the examples above I went for the ‘Shades of Grey’ preset in the Trace Image dialogue.
