I’ve got a strong idea in my mind of what the historical Robert Adam would have looked like, but this is a comic strip, not a dramatised documentary, and I’m going for a pantomime version of the character. I’ve pared down the drawing to a cartoony style, which I think should work much better.
I’ve delved into the colour wheel rather than sticking to a standard set of swatches as I previously did but this is just a start. I would probably also add some texture, for instance on the gargoyle, the original of which, at Nostell, has a scaly texture.
I’m struggling to get into gear with my comic strip. On the one hand, I’m grateful that it’s not a commission, so there’s no deadline looming, but on the other hand, I only pick it up for odd moments in the evening, so it lacks the momentum you’d get from a freelance job.
I tried to get away from frames full of talking heads by adding a more dramatic first frame to this 4-panel comic strip by having the conversation taking place up on the scaffolding of Robert Adam’s edifice but then realised that I needed to focus on the relationship between my two characters, rather than the setting. My aim is to get a conversation going in the strip; action and reaction.
Initial rough for the first frame.
So glad that I haven’t got a client who needs the finished artwork in a hurry!
Yes, I admit it; it would be easier for me to create characters by doodling away, pen on paper, but getting familiar with the feel of Apple Pencil on iPad screen, is really the point of the project for me, that and learning Clip Art Studio.
With a low over the North Atlantic, we’ve got the prospect of warm winds coming up from France and Spain but this morning it’s blowing so cold that, by the time I’ve drawn the ewe, my eyes are watering so much that I can hardly focus on the twin lambs which are following her.
Time to go indoors here at Charlotte’s Ice Cream Parlour for coffee and scones and to draw the view looking up the Calder Valley to the moors.
Can I ever draw bottles without thinking of Morandi? Certainly not when I’m drawing the stoneware bottles they keep lined up on the window sills at Filmore & Union in the Redbrick Mill in Batley.
My first commission after leaving college was to spend a weekend drawing at a house, a Victorian vicarage, not far from Oxford. I took down my Natural History Illustration degree show at the Royal College of Art, got on the train to Oxford and enjoyed drawing for a long weekend. My favourite subject was the interior of the potting shed, which included a wooden wheelbarrow, tools, a trug and, of course, stacks of assorted terra cotta plant pots. That pen drawing became the centre spread of the small sketchbook that I produced, which consisted of eight or perhaps as many as a dozen pages, carefully extracted from my Bushey foolscap sketchbook, which they had bound as a slim hardback.
I remember thinking that if this was life after college, I could get used to it, as it was basically a continuation of what I’d done at college, just draw, draw, draw, day in day out, except that now someone was willing to pay me to do it!
Morandi Sketchbook
The man who I was working for had been in the British Army in Bologna during World War II, and had befriended Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) and, I think, helped him out during a difficult time. Morandi presented him with (or more probably, he bought from Morandi) a small sketchbook of drawings – of bottles, naturally. Morandi had used whatever had come to hand and my memory is that at least some of the drawings were in ballpoint pen on cheap paper.
Earlier this month, on a previous visit to Filmore & Union.
Morandi’s bottles were never as standoffish as the bottles in Filmore & Union, but I guess that’s the reserved character of British bottles compared with Morandi’s highly sociable Italian bottiglie, which were always getting together with boxes, jars, jugs and vases.
When I was a student, my favourite painting in the National Gallery was Vuillard’s La Cheminée but probably, if I had the choice today, the painting that I’d most like to live with would be a small Morandi.
Now that I’ve steadily gone through the basics of Clip Studio Paint EX, I’m ready to get the program working for me and to use its features to speed up my workflow.
As I’m sticking with the same layout for the whole series of Gargoyle comic strips, I’ve saved the four-frame layout as a template, which is simply the blank comic strip before I’ve added any drawings or text.
All I have to do next time is open the template and get straight on with the drawing.
The title of the strip goes in a fifth frame; the only difference is that this one has no border around it.
Clip Studio Paint EX, iPad Pro and Apple Pencil
Frame & Paper
If the Frame as a whole is selected, you won’t be able to draw on any of the layers within that frame.
What once seemed obscure has now become second nature to me. For instance, when using the pen or pencil tool, I was often baffled when the mouse-pointer changed to a ‘No Entry’ sign and I was unable to draw. Now if that happens, I head straight for the Frames palette as it usually turns out that I’m attempting to draw on the ‘Frame’ rather than on the virtual ‘paper’ (my layers for roughs, pencils, pen and paint) inside that frame.
Colour Set & Colour Wheel
For my first Adam & the Gargoyle comic strip I kept the process as simple as possible by accepting all the defaults. I chose colours from the Default color set but I’m now starting to use the Colour Wheel, which gives an almost infinitely varied choice of colours.
Borders and Balloons
I’m now able to adjust the widthof the border around each frame and of the border around the speech bubbles.
That elusive balloon-editing palette. I don’t normally keeping it floating in the workspace.
The latter isn’t that obvious, as you need to select the bubble with the Object Selector(left), not the Text Tool and you then have to delve down into the Tool Property [Object] Sub-tool Palette.
Link
Clip Paint Studio EX: the iPad version is currently free for the first six months, if you want to try it.
I’ve enjoyed drawing this comic strip in Clip Studio Paint EX as it’s been such a learning experience. Every aspect of the strip could do with some tweaking to get it as I want but at least I’ve gone through every stage involved in producing a comic.
I’ve often thought how much quicker it would have been to draw it by hand, and, to be honest, I’d probably have preferred a hand-drawn, watercolour approach, but that wasn’t the point of the exercise for me; the main aim was to get to know the software and to shake my ideas up a bit by tackling an illustration project from a different perspective.
Hand-drawn Fonts
The hand-lettered font used in the speech bubbles is CC Joe Kubert, a tribute to the DC Comics artist.
The bold face used for the ‘HEY! YOU!’ speech bubble is BadaBoom Pro BB Italic.
My own wobbly hand-lettering would have given the strip a gentler look but I love the way these bolder typefaces give the strip pace; the reader isn’t going linger, admiring the typefaces, as they might pause to admire the copperplate calligraphy that would be one approach to an a strip set in the eighteenth century.
The typeface for the main title was added in Photoshop CS5, as my iPad only carries a limited number of fonts. This is a typeface called Trattatello, which is the Italian for ‘tract’. It’s perfect for my strip as one of the characters, Robert Adam, has been on the Grand Tour to Rome and is determined to use the true Classical style in his architecture and interior design. In fact he’s written a tract about it, well a bit more than that; a lavishly illustrated coffee table book of his designs.
You can imagine that he’s not exactly going to hit it off with the gargoyle.
Character & Storyline
After the learning curve that I’ve been on in getting familiar with Clip Studio’s tools and palettes, the end result seems ridiculously simple. As you can probably see from the more involved drawing in this last frame, I’m now keen to get into developing characters and storylines.
The four-panel strip format is a great way to concentrate my ideas and I’ve got plenty of scenarios in mind, in fact I keep waking up in the middle of the night with some bright idea or another. It’s also inspiring walking around Nostell Priory Park, where the strip is set.
Hopefully I’ll speed up production and be able to work through a lot of these storylines. I feel that drawing comic strips is something which requires a feedback loop; by which I mean it’s no use planning your project to the nth degree, you need to see something on paper (or in this case, on screen) and react to and build on that.
I choose the ducks that appear to have settled down by the pool at Charlotte’s Ice Cream Parlour, but sleeping ducks are soon disturbed; preening ducks soon go on to the next stage in their routine; and all of them, as soon as I get my watercolours out, seem to remember that they’ve got urgent business in the duck shelter and they disappear out of sight altogether.
It’s such a pleasure attempting to draw them and, like my attempts at creating frames for a comic strip yesterday, I realise that all I need to do is keep at it, try my best and some of the character of each bird will come over in my drawing.
After dinosaurs, mallard drakes were one of my earliest inspirations for drawing natural history. They’re so handsome at this time of year and even a basic drawing soon appears mallard-like when you add the bottle green of the head, the brown of the breast and the yellow of the bill.
When Sir Peter Scott was a young school boy and wanted to paint nothing but ducks, his art teacher told him:
“Go away and paint a pudding, when you’ve learnt to paint a pudding, then you can move on to painting ducks.”
As so many of my sketchbooks feature drawings made in coffee shops and tea rooms, I think that I can say that I’ve now had adequate practise at painting puddings.
There’s only one way to get into Clip Paint Studio and that’s to dive in and have a go. This is far from the look that I’ve envisaged for my Adam & the Gargoyle comic strip but I realise that – as happened with the scans of colour slides I’ve been doing recently – the way to get familiar with the process is to keep going through it, again and again, building from the bits that I can do now to the more subtle tweaks that should enable me to get things looking just as I want them to.
Continuing to archive Richard Brook’s slides of potential wildlife habitats in the Aire and Calder valleys in the 1970s and 80s, I came across this spread, which Richard had photographed, from a Yorkshire Post Magazine from 1986 which sums up what was at stake. Journalist Derek Foster, who interviewed Richard at the time, writes:
“. . . the birds still come, though in dwindling numbers, and the question is; can they wait until 2001 to resume the good life they have built up over a hundred years?”
Richard has made a note on the slide that the aerial photograph of Fairburn Ings dates from 1983.
So ‘wonderland’ or ‘nightmare’? I don’t think that Richard, even in his wildest dreams, would have predicted that spoonbills, which haven’t nested regularly in Britain since the 1700s, would ever nest in an area that at that time was so largely dominated by colliery spoil tips but which is now the RSPB Fairburn Ings Reserve.
Stanley Sewage Farm, 1973
It might have taken some imagination to see the potential in derelict spoil heaps but the reed beds at Stanley Sewage Farm, which Richard photographed on Tuesday, 11 September, 1973, already looked like a nature reserve.
In recent years, Stanley Church (far left) has been demolished and I’d be surprised if those rhubarb forcing sheds, in the field on the right, beyond the reed bed, are still there.
Looking up the Calder Valley, this is the bed at the south-east end of the sewage farm, with the houses of Ferry Lane, Stanley, in the background. This does look more utilitarian, and, looking at the photograph, I can recall the smell that lingered around sewage lagoons.
Finally, here’s the main bed with the houses of Aberford Road, Stanley, in the background. I think that large brick building on the left must be the former Stanley Picture House, built in 1930. According to the Stanley History Online website, this was once known as ‘The Clog and Rhubarb’.
I’ve been making a start on archiving a collection of colour slides taken by Richard Brook(1943-2017), for many years the Conservation Officer of the Wakefield Naturalists’ Society. He photographed the East Ash Lagoon at Leventhorpe from the lagoon’s northwest corner on Sunday, 2 September, 1973. Pulverised fly ash was pumped from power stations into lagoons and left to settle out.
Richard could see the potential of these lagoons as nature reserves and he documented every one of them – along with subsidence flashes and sand quarries -within five or six miles radius of Wakefield, so his collection of slides form a unique record of post-industrial West Yorkshire.
Dust & Scratch Removal
Before.
I’m gradually learning my way around the slide scanning option of my SilverFast scanning program and also learning easier ways to remove specks of dust and other blemishes from the slides.
In Photoshop CS5, I’ve just discovered the Dust & Scratches filter, which is hidden away in the Photoshop Filter Menu under the heading Noise.
After
It’s a lot quicker than using the Spot Healing Brush to individually remove blemishes, although that has it’s part to play too: Dust & Scratch Filter for the whole sky, Spot Healing Brush for getting into more detailed parts of the image.
