Category: Drawing

Black Cat Sketches

We haven’t caught up with our friend Diana for a while, which gives me more time than I usually allow myself to sit and draw and, for once, PC the black cat is in a cooperative mood and doesn’t decide that the sitting is over after ten or twenty minutes as he usually does.

Black cat

The A6 sketchbook that I’ve just finished was so handy for slipping into a pocket or into my smallest art bag but the A5 format that I’ve just switched to gives me the opportunity to keep starting again when PC moves, building up a page of different poses.

Black catIn this larger art bag I’ve got room for crayons as well as my usual watercolours, so I’ve used them for a change. Obviously black is the colour that I’ve used most but I could see that PC was picking up a bit of reflected light on his glossy coat from the carpet, although this looked orangey to me rather than the pinkish red of the carpet.

Black cat

cloudsLater PC’s friend, a long-haired Siamese, strode in through the conservatory. He didn’t pause to return PC’s greeting but carried straight on to the food bowl in the corner of the kitchen. He knows his way around.

Summer Landscape

Stubble field

Room for one last little landscape sketch in my postcard-sized Seawhite Watercolour Travel Journal: a stubble field at Field House Farm, Overton, seen from the Seed Room Cafe at the Horticentre. The houses of Thornhill Edge sit amongst the trees on the ridge in the background, on the far side of the Smithy Brook Valley.

The original sketch is 9 cm, just over 3 inches, across.

Mr Lindley

I’ve struggled with this sketch of my fourth year junior school teacher, not just because I’m still trying out new techniques in Clip Studio Paint but also because, although I’ve got a vivid image of him in my mind, I find it hard to capture that in a drawing.

Barbara thinks that I’ve made him look too young and I think that’s partly down to exaggerating the size of his hands and face.

I found my previous year teacher, Mr Thompson, easier; he was nearing retirement and was a larger than life character. Mr Lindley was a  great teacher, in mid-career – he went on to become a headmaster – and he didn’t have the kind of foibles that lend themselves to caricature.

I might try the headmaster Mr Douglas next and come back to Mr Lindley when I’ve improved my technique.

Market Day

I’ve dropped a few sketchbook drawings into a comic page template. I don’t know if I’ll ever master the technique of hand-drawn lettering using a graphics pad but at least with these frames from Clip Studio Paint, I’ve at last succeeded in creating the effect of a drawing bursting out of a frame.

Drawings from Ossett; di Bosco, Horbury Bridge; and Epworth, North Lincolnshire. The two on the left are pen and watercolour, the building on the right was coloured in Clip Studio.

I’m struggling to take in all the options available but I’m learning; for instance, when exporting a comic page like this for the web, you’d think that the sharpest JPEG image would be the best but a midway quality setting produces a smoother image, fewer artefacts, such as fringes around the lettering.

Cushions in Colour

I drew these cushions in pen and ink at Barbara’s brother’s the other day but left the colouring for later, to give me some practice with the Clip Studio Paint watercolor brush tool, in this case set to opacity watercolor. As usual, the pen layer stays on top, in crisp monochrome.

In keeping with my current interest in comics, I’ve included a hand-drawn border. Any detail in a comic should help to tell the story, so I tried to bring out the character of these cushions, as if they were set dressing in a scene.

As characters, I’d say these cushions are laid back but a little rumpled and worn at the seams. Perhaps they’re the louche, laid back, Lotharios of the cushion world, slouching suspiciously in the corner as they hatch their next scheme.

Or perhaps they’re just ordinary cushions but guilty of a bit of overacting.

A Lot of Duckweed

I haven’t turned on the hose pipe during this long dry spell but this weekend the pond had got so low that I felt I had to. The surface was entirely covered with duckweed, so I put on my arm-length waterproof gloves and pulled it out around the edges, then used a pond net to scoop up the remaining clumps in the middle.

A A Milne’s poem Bad Sir Brian Botany came to mind. The bit where Sir Brian gets his comeuppance from the villagers:

“Sir Brian went a journey, and he found a lot of duckweed . . . “

I left the piles of duckweed at the water’s edge to give the pond life a chance to find its way back and gave a helping hand to a few ramshorn snails, dragonfly larvae and black water beetles that I spotted struggling.

I didn’t see any frogs or newts but I was skimming the surface layers and they were probably lying low.

Continue reading A Lot of Duckweed

Clip Studio Sketch

After a bit of a break, I’ve gone back to Clip Studio Paint on the iPad Pro, drawing with an Apple Pencil. Struggling to draw from memory on the iPad (see below), I decided to re-familiarise myself with the process by drawing three India ink bottles that happened to be sitting on my desk.

As usual, I started with a pencil layer, which proved useful because I made the third bottle that I drew a bit too small compared with the others. I realised that it wasn’t going to work as I inked it in (below) so it was easy to go back to the pencil outline, to correct the proportions (right). Virtual erasers don’t chew up the virtual paper.

I created a new layer labelled ‘pen’ and drew with a G-pen, one of the standard pens in the Clip Studio toolbox.

I added a ‘paint’ layer and painted with some of the watercolour brushes but then felt that I needed some darker areas, so added another layer for different ink brushes.

I decided on a tonal background rather than the white of the virtual paper, so used the rectangle tool to draw a box around the subject which I then followed on one final layer, using the pen tool to trace around the box, so that the line matched the drawing.

Teacher in Tweed

This is the drawing from memory that I was struggling  with. It was supposed to be one of my teachers but I haven’t caught his character as I remember him. After a bit of drawing from life, I’m ready to try drawing from memory again.

Links

Clip Studio Paint

iPad Pro

Mastering Comics

I’ve drawn comic strips since since I was aged eight or nine and I’ve published a few of them, from as early as 1979 in my Sketchbook of the Natural History of Wakefield, so you might think that I’ve left it a bit late in my career to read Mastering Comics, the sequel to Drawing Words & Writing Pictures by Jessica Abel and Matt Madden.

I’ve learnt a lot from it and I’ve especially enjoyed being immersed in all things comic: writing, planning, printing, binding and trying to make a living. It reminds me of the years that I was lucky enough to spend in total immersion in graphics and illustration during my time at art college.

Comic creators Abel and Madden teach the subject at New York’s School of Visual Arts, so they’re well aware of the practicalities and the questions that are likely to arise during the creative process. I can’t get to New York to take one of their courses, I’d get a lot out of that, so this is the next best thing.

Homework

Perspective homework: examples by Jessica Abel and Francois Ayroles. An activity I’d like to try for myself.

I decided to read right through the book but I’d like to go back and try some of the activities they suggest:

  • a sketchbook comic drawn entirely on location (which still evokes some kind of story)
  • a comic with no people that includes examples of different perspectives and viewpoints
  • a traditionally coloured comic using black line and CMY (cyan, magenta, yellow) colours.

Link

Drawing Words & Writing Pictures

Cinnabar Caterpillar

Cinnabar moth caterpillar on common ragwort at Ashbyville Local Nature Reserve, Scunthorpe.

Published
Categorized as Drawing

Teachers

 

Continuing to experiment with drawing comics in line only, I’ve made a start on trying to capture memories of my class teachers from junior school days.

Miss Andrassy – I think she was ‘Miss’, not Mrs – was our teacher when we started at St Peter’s Juniors in Horbury.

Miss Andrassy was keen on art and I remember her setting up a still life for us to draw.

In our second year, Mr Harker, then in the pre-fab in the playground, was the teacher who first introduced us to dip pens and joined-up writing.

I’ve got strong mental impressions of these characters but some details of their appearance are guesswork, for instance did Miss Andrassy wear glasses?

I’ll come back to her after I’ve drawn Mr Thompson (third year) and Mr Lindley (fourth year), as I’m sure I could get nearer to the character I see in my mind’s eye.

Mr Harker didn’t tax my memory to the same extent as I saw him earlier this year in Debenham’s cafe in Wakefield, and he’s very much the same personality that I remember from almost sixty years ago.