I’ve used the pen tool with the G-pen nib in Clip Studio Paint in this drawing of Kershaw’s Newsagents, Horbury, in 1938. The effect is very similar to my regular pen and ink drawings, although bringing the whole drawing together wasn’t so straightforward; although I appreciated being able to zoom in on the different sections of the drawing as I worked, this did mean that it felt a bit like working on a jigsaw: I’d concentrate on one area, such as an edge, but I’d lose sight of the picture of a whole as I did that.
Adding colour was also unfamiliar to me, compared with using my watercolours. I’ve stuck to one brush to get the feel for that particular setting, but the result feels like colouring using a felt-tip pen.
The whole exercise has been useful for getting used to the range of marks that I can produce with pen and brush in the program. I’m sure that I’ll find it useful.
Tracing from a vintage postcard in Clip Studio Paint.
I recently joined a local history group on Facebook, focussing on Horbury and neighbouring Sitlington. This newsagents caught my attention; it appears in the left-hand corner of a postcard of Queen Street, Horbury, one of series which Helen Bickerdike, administrator of the group, has been posting.
I’ve been doing a bit or research into the film titles on the poster for the Savoy Cinema and into what I can decipher of the newspapers and journals. I’ll explain more when I finish the picture and can pick out some of the details but it must have been taken a year or two before the outbreak of World War II, perhaps in January, 1938.
The shop, which was Noble’s Newsagents in until the late 1960s, appears, second from the left, on the cover of my booklet.
Like the digital painting of Coxley Beck which I posted the other day, I’m doing this as a way of getting thoroughly familiar with the program Clip Studio Paint.
When I was writing my local history booklets, such as Around Old Horbury (1998), I did a lot of drawings like this, initially by sitting on street corners with my sketchbook, but later using my own photographs as reference.
I had a unique opportunity when I redrew the cover illustration as a wrap-around design for a china mug. When I arrived in Horbury, one Sunday morning, I discovered that they’d closed the High Street for resurfacing and I was able to sit on my fishing stool in the middle of the road, to get a perfect view of the sweeping curve at the lower end of Queen Street.
Link
Around Old Horbury on my Willow Island Editions website (£2.95, post free in the U.K.)
This digital painting has turned out looking like the starting point for one of my acrylic on hardboard paintings, before I’d started adding details of tree, water and ferns.
Coxley Beck is running opaque with sediment where it passes through an old mill race at Horbury Bridge. I’ve draw this on my iPad Pro, using an Apple Pencil in the Clip Studio Paint program.
I pasted a photograph that I’d taken this afternoon into the lowest layer of my Clip Studio Paint document, then added a layer for pencil above it. So that I could see where I was going with the pencil, I partially faded out the photograph by using the opacity slider for that layer.
I traced the trees and the line of the beck in pencil, then hid the photograph by clicking its eye symbol in the layer palette and drew using the pen tool, using my pencil tracing as a guide.
Paint Layer
Once I’d finished with the pencil layer, I hid it and added a new layer for paint. In order not to paint over my pen lines, I added the paint layer below the pen layer.
As I worked, I kept referring back to the photograph layer, now with the opacity slider set back at 100%, and used the eye-dropper tool to sample colour. I couldn’t always get the colour that I wanted, so I also used some of the standard swatches and the colour wheel.
In the odd spots that I hadn’t painted, the default white background of what Clip Studio refers to as ‘paper’ showed through, making Coxley Beck look more sparkly than it actually does this afternoon, so I added a background layer of a suitably muddy brown.
Pen, initial pencil sketch and first attempts at adding colour.
It reminds me of when I painted in acrylic and I’d start by paintingthe whole canvas in a neutral light grey, so that I wasn’t misled when mixing tones by a brilliant white background.
I used various digital pens, finishing up with the textured pen and various versions of the watercolour brush, including dense watercolour.
I look forward to trying the technique with another subject.
It’s that time of the month again, when I put together my Wild Yorkshire sketchbook spread for the Dalesman magazine. I’m pleased with the way that the illustrations have come together but, for the lettering, I’m going for a slightly different technique.
Last month, I found that the Noodler’s ink that I use, which is waterproof when dry, was taking a surprisingly long time to dry on layout paper.
Even when I came back to my work after a break, there was still a danger that I’d smear a carefully hand-lettered heading or paragraph
I’ve switched to ordinary, non-waterproof Lamy fountain pen ink, which usually dries in minutes and instead of layout paper I’ve gone for a classic letter-writing paper, Basildon Bond, which is a pleasure to use: after all that is what it was designed for. It’s more substantial than layout paper, which gives me a feeling of confidence, something that I need when I attempt my neatest lettering with my waywardly shaky hand.
Once I get into the rhythm of lettering, I enjoy it. It just when I’m getting started that I’m a bit stuttery.
The pad comes with a pre-ruled backing sheet with lines that are at just the right spacing when I write with a Lamy Safari with a medium nib.
We got a couple of funny looks as we photographed this blank Pig Pig sketchbook at Aysgarth, but there is a purpose: I can use it as the background for my Dalesman nature diary next autumn.
My autumn sketchbook work isn’t very impressive; between online courses and fitting in my ten thousand paces a day, I haven’t given myself much time for drawing, which is a shame as we’ve taken short breaks in the Lake District, the Dales and on the Yorkshire Coast.
We’re now into winter proper, specks of snow are drifting down over the garden and I’ll be quite happy to stick to day trips for the next couple of months.
Rush hour at Nethergill Farm, Langstrothdale, in November, white shorthorn.
We saw large flocks of fieldfares one misty morning on our Dales break in Langstrothdale but we’ve seen very few on our home patch. On our regular visits to Nostell Priory, we’ve seen flocks of crows and rooks on the grassland, along with a few mistle thrushes. As it has been such a good year for berries, perhaps our winter thrushes are still foraging in the hedgerows.
Lower Falls, Aysgarth, 2 November.
Tufted ducks and gadwall have joined the resident mallards and Canada geese on lakes and there are now two or three pairs of goosanders beginning to gather in their regular spot on the quieter side of the Middle Lake.
Fern-leaved beech, the Menagerie, Nostell Priory, 8 November.
The grey squirrels – all of them looking sleek and bushy-tailed – all seem to be engaged in caching their sweet chestnuts for the winter. We haven’t seen many examples of them chasing each other, prior to mating.
More practice in drawing on my iPad with an Apple pencil and, as I’m using Clip Studio Paint, I’ve got the option of framing the drawing in a ruled border.
I had intended to add an ink layer but decided that pencil was more appropriate for the relaxed subject matter.
There are so many options available to create different effects when using a digital brush but, until I’ve got more familiar with the process, I’m keeping things simple, using the standard settings for the entire drawing.
Pencil, ink, colour and layout produced using an Apple Pencil on an iPad Pro in the Clip Studio Paint program. I’d struggle to draw frames as neatly as this by hand.
Continuing on my learning curve with Clip Studio Paint, this doodle is a real achievement as I’ve now worked out how to lay out a comic strip using the program on the iPad. As you create the frames, you can set it so that the program creates a separate image folder for each frame.
Why should that be an advantage? Well, if you’ve ever drawn a comic strip by hand, using a ruling pen to draw the borders, you’ll know that you have to take care not to go over the line when you’re drawing, otherwise you’re giving yourself extra work going round with the Tippex to clean things up before publication (or the Photoshop equivalent of Tippex).
If you need a drawing to run through adjacent frames – for instance in a scene where figures move through a landscape – you can set things up so that several frames, or the whole page, share the same folder.
Drawing all those frames for my flick-book cartoons has helped me to feel at ease using Clip Studio Paint on the iPad. One advantage the iPad is that you can zoom in to work on details with a pinching movement of two fingers and you can rotate the whole drawing, simply by rotating two fingers. These two actions were useful when it came to writing in all the titles of the books.
Once the iPad knows that you’re drawing with an Apple Pencil, it rejects any finger movements it detects as drawing but still responds to any gestures, such as rotation and zooming in.
Paper, Pen & Pencil
There are four layers in my original Clip Studio file: the default paper background (plain white); pencil, for my initial drawing; colour, using the watercolour brush and pen, using the ‘real G-pen’.
To make it more like a real sketchbook drawing, I left my original pencil lines visible. If I’d been aiming for finished-looking illustration, I could have removed all the pencil work with a single click of the mouse: no meticulous rubbing out with a soft art eraser.
I’ve learnt a lot since my first attempt at a flick-book style animation using Clip Studio Paint. It’s such a versatile program, something like Photoshop but aimed specifically at comic artists illustrators but, with so many possibilities, I can’t hope become familiar with it all in just a few sessions.
Mugshot
I’m sticking to the basic process that worked for me in the first animation and gradually building up my skills from there. My main advance here was adding the coloured background.
As I experimented with the settings of the animation cels, the ‘undo’ button came in handy or more than one occasion but that’s a good way to discover aspects of the program: for instance its ability to output drawings as a half-tone made up of dots. It would be great for a wanted poster or a newspaper cutting in a comic strip story. Judging by that photograph, he’s definitely guilty.
Clip Studio Paint offers the possibility of animating drawings and, since there’s now a new version of the program for the iPad, I thought that it was time to give it a go.
This rotating head is my first attempt. The layers have a degree of transparency, so that I can see my previous drawing, as a fainter, bluer image, as I start on the next frame.
Onion Skinning
It’s like the traditional animator’s light-box, what’s sometimes referred to as onion skinning: viewing several frames at once.
I drew the animation test (above) using the Clip Studio pencil tool then went over it with the pen tool (right) trying to make a few corrections as I went.
As I’m still not up to speed in Clip Studio Paint, I export an animated GIF from Clip Studio to Adobe Photoshop CS5 for the final adjustments of repeating the eight frames in reverse order to make a continuous loop and cropping the final image.
I still need to work out the best way to add pen and colour layer to each frame, but that’s as far as I’m going with this head: something went wrong with the eyes!
Adding colour was also unfamiliar to me, compared with using my watercolours. I’ve stuck to one brush to get the feel for that particular setting, but the result feels like colouring using a felt-tip pen.
