I’ve been using my new light pad a lot transferring roughs to the final artwork and, in this case, from initial rough to a cleaned up version. As you can see, I started this in pencil then defined it in ink.
Having gone to so much care with the second rough, there didn’t seem any point in tracing it in pencil onto the watercolour paper so I traced it in ink, trying to be free and relaxed in my line. That saves not only the stage of tracing in pencil onto the watercolour paper, but also a lot of rubbing out once the pen line has dried.
As a drawing, I prefer the rough, which is animated because of the pencil construction lines however I hope the final pen drawing will come to life when I add inked shadows and finally watercolour.
I’m acting as fight arranger this morning. As I pencil and then start inking the fight with poachers page I’m ironing out some of the inconsistencies in my roughs, always with clarity in telling the story as my main consideration.
For instance in my first version of the frame in which Waterton forces the poacher to drop the knife, I realised that the knife was falling the wrong way, as if the poacher had been holding it upside down.
Manga Now!
Manga Now! by Keith Sparrow and The Big Painting Challenge by Rosa Roberts. Wish that I had time to go through the tutorials in both these books but at least they can give me a few tips for aspects of my comic strip.
I’ve always been sceptical of those ‘how to draw super-heroes’ books but in drawing this fight scene I can see the need for some kind of a system for getting dynamic figures convincingly onto paper. It’s more like choreography than life drawing. I’ve drawn my hand hundreds of times but always in a relaxed position.
I like this scribbly attempt to draw my hand in the right position as a drawing but it’s not much use as reference for my comic strip.
I tried one of Keith Sparrow’s suggestions in Manga Now! and put a small mirror on the desk to check out the outspread hand for the poacher dropping the knife but I couldn’t get my hand into the correct perspective nor could I hold the pose in the twisted outstretched position (too many cups of tea at breakfast time, as usual!) and nor could I effectively sketch it single handed. Another problem is that my fingers are long so my hands don’t have the proportions that I need for my powerfully built poacher character.
I’d struggle in a similar way if I tried to take a photograph my hand so I’m concluding that building up the hand in simple block form (above), another suggestion in Keith Sparrow’s Manga Now!, is going to be the best way for me to get the dynamic hands in this story doing exactly what I want them to.
Last week I was struggling to use my perspex drawing board as a lightbox in the bright sunlight even with the studio blind down and I had to resort to tracing from my rough to watercolour paper on the back bedroom window. This Huion A4 LED light pad, delivered today, is a great improvement.
Working in the confines of a single panel I find that I tend to squeeze my figures in. When I look at them I feel that the proportion isn’t quite right. They look like figures trying to squeeze into a lift but with such a cropped view it’s difficult to see what’s going wrong.
With the light pad I can transfer from a problem figure on the watercolour paper to a sheet of layout paper then work out the pose including the parts of the figure that fall outside the boundary of the frame.
The layout paper then goes under the watercolour paper and I can pencil in, then ink in, the improved version of the figure.
My rough and detail from George Walker’s illustration, 1814, the dog handler holding back the hounds in a hunt in open country with hawks.
Sometimes I come across the perfect source of reference. In this first frame of my comic strip version of the fight between Waterton and the poachers in Walton Park I drew the astonished poacher realising that he’d been tricked by Waterton into firing at a wooden decoy pheasant. Googling for images of Yorkshire workers and countrymen in the early Victorian period, I came across George Walker’s Costume of Yorkshire, a book that I’ve used in my research on several previous occasions.
It’s hard to believe, seeing the two of them together (above), but I drew the rough before I stumbled across the Walker illustration. It’s so similar, with the exception of those lapels, that I have to wonder whether the image was lingering in my mind from when I last browsed through the book. Probably not, but this is the archetypal image that I have of an early Victorian countryman.
My scene takes place in 1835 and Walker published his book in 1814, but I think that country workers and their poacher rivals would be fairly conservative in their dress at that time.
For the other poacher, in my rough I’d gone for a powerful looking man with mutton chop whiskers and therefore too similar to the villain from the soap works scene, Edward Thornhill Simpson.
Again, George Walker comes to the rescue. His moor guide (left) will be my model for the other poacher.
Walker’s drawings were kept for many years at Walton Hall in the collection of Edward Hailstone. In the introduction to a new edition of Costume of Yorkshire, written at Walton Hall in the Easter 1885, Hailstone writes;
‘like his intimate friend Mr. Waterton of Walton Hall, [Walker]would constantly be out at early dawn in the summer months, to watch the habits of the feathered race.’
One further link; Hailstone rented Walton Hall on a long term lease from the soap manufacturing Simpson family, who had bought the property from Waterton’s son Edmund.
Forty years ago today was my last day at college. Here I am with the painting of birds in the Royal College of Art greenhouse, that I’d started three years earlier and which I thought might be a six week job . . .
I find pencil roughs the quickest way to develop my ideas. I’ve got a wonderful program, Manga Studio, which can easily handle this process but pencil, eraser and the occasional spot of Tipp-Ex correction fluid makes for a more hands on, tactile way of working.
Referring back to the script, I’m going through the basic outline of my first storyboard-style roughs, trying to add drama, clarity and a more interesting layout.
We’ve had a little round of appointments to catch up with over the last couple of days, not just the dentist’s and doctor’s, where I made the two sketches in the waiting rooms, but also the opticians where I had a fitting for my new glasses (same frames but with new high tech varifocal 100% UV proof lenses) so we deserved a lunch break at the Seed Room, where I drew the view looking north over Smithy Brook Valley and Thornhill Edge.
I keep imagining that I’m producing a stage play. Mr Simpson is really getting into his character as the villain of the piece, all sneers and sarcasm, but, as an illustrator I’m responsible for the bit part players too; fo their costume, make-up, even their back story, as far as it goes.
I can imagine the extra playing the labourer saying to me ‘What’s my motivation in this scene?’
‘Er . . . could you lean on your shovel and smirk, as if you’re thinking “this should be fun”?’
I’ve learnt a lot about the strategy of producing a comic strip while working on this page. For instance, for those first two panels (which were the last to be completed) I drew them both first and then coloured them together, to save mixing the colours twice.
I realise that a decisive style is going to work best, rather than the soft tentative approach that I use for natural history subjects. Plenty of structure and drama is what’s needed in a comic strip.
Whatever my misgivings about this page, I’m now leaving it until I’ve finished the other eleven pages, then I can come back to it and review it. Hopefully I will feel that it still works in the context of the story.
How do I stop WordPress Compressing my Files?
Setting compression to 100% in the Media settings in WordPress. But it still compresses to 90%!So how come this image is so sharp? It’s a PNG and WordPress doesn’t ‘help’ you save bandwidth by compressing them.
Having gone to so much trouble, I’m keen that my work comes over as crisply as possible in this blog, allowing for the inevitable loss of sharpness that you’re always going to get between the paper version and the onscreen image. I’ve added a plugin to stop my web page program WordPress compressing my JPGs (which it does in order to save bandwidth) as this is what makes them lose sharpness.
Yes, I know that it’s a marginal loss of sharpness, but I’m an illustrator. We worry about such things!
Unfortunately the plugin that I’m using, WP Resized Image Quality, hasn’t been tested on the latest version of WordPress and, would you believe it, my JPGs, which I’ve already tweaked to perfection in Photoshop, are still getting compressed.
By the way, I checked with Christine Rondeau who designed Mon Cahier, the theme that I use for my WordPress posts, and she tells me the compression definitely isn’t happening there.
It’s so hot today that I’ve gone into shorts for the first time so this is a good opportunity to switch from drawing hands to feet.
My feet aren’t as weather-beaten as my hands but when it comes to watercolour I still go mainly for yellow ochre and dashes of permanent rose with neutral tint, burnt sienna and raw umber in the shadows.
The drawing with my foot resting on the arm of the sofa gives more descriptive lighting than the one down on our grey sofa because there’s a secondary light from the patio windows filling in the shadow down the right side of my foot.
I’ll try and use secondary lighting to add a touch of drama to some of the frames in my Waterton comic strip. Waterton went barefoot when he climbing trees, so I’m going to have to include feet at some stage.
I’ve been looking forward to seeing this drawing in colour. It looks rather stagey but it tells the story clearly, so I’ll stick with this version.
This is the first time that I’ve added a curved tail to a speech balloon. In Manga Studio EX5 this kind of tail is known as a spline. Mathematically, a spline curve is one that moves through a given series of points. Because of lack of headroom in this frame, a straight tail would have to emerge from the side of the balloon, which would look rather awkward.
No wonder Simpson looks so pleased with himself, he’s the first character to get a spline bubble in this comic strip. I don’t blame Waterton for storming off indignantly.
I’ve left the background muted because I can easily add more colour if it’s needed but, as it’s transparent watercolour, I can’t remove it if I overdo it.
I’ve been using my new light pad a lot transferring roughs to the final artwork and, in this case, from initial rough to a cleaned up version. As you can see, I started this in pencil then defined it in ink.
Having gone to so much care with the second rough, there didn’t seem any point in tracing it in pencil onto the watercolour paper so I traced it in ink, trying to be free and relaxed in my line. That saves not only the stage of tracing in pencil onto the watercolour paper, but also a lot of rubbing out once the pen line has dried.
