Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
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.
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.
Any tips would be welcome!
Links; WP Resized Image Quality
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.
Edward Thornhill Simpson doesn’t pop up in a puff of smoke through a trap door under a green spotlight like a pantomime villain but, for the purposes of my Waterton comic, he comes as close to that as I can manage within the historical context.
I keep thinking of the Dollars Trilogy as I stage my action and, as I draw, find myself concocting unlikely scenarios for a three-way shoot-out by introducing Waterton’s other great rival John James Audubon. It would be more dramatic than the long legal battle that ensued but we’ve got to stick to the historical facts.
I’m probably getting drawn into the imagined world that I’m creating a bit too much for my own good but I think that I need to keep improvising, varying my approach, to bring the story to life.
When I’m designing a set for the local pantomime I sit halfway down the hall, look towards the stage and sketch the scene that I’m conjuring up in my mind. Although I want to be historically convincing, it’s important to keep that element of light-hearted improvisation.
With so many hands to draw for my Waterton comic, I might as well get a bit of practice in while I wait at the hairdressers.
I like the flat colour and confident line used in many comic strips, for example in the Adventures of Tintin, but my wiry pen drawing is better suited to watercolour.
A flat flesh colour wouldn’t give a true impression of the back of my hand which has yellowish and reddish patches plus a variety of browns and warm greys in the shadows. It looks lived in. Using pen and watercolour runs the risk of overloading the comic strip with visual information but I think it’s worth trying to make it work. My section of the story is set in a wildlife sanctuary so watercolour going to work well for the colours and texture of the natural world. In his autobiography, Waterton describes himself as looking as if he has spent his life out of doors in all weathers, so he needs to look like a part of the natural world too.
The confrontation between Charles Waterton and Edward Thornhill Simpson the soap manufacturer is rather wordy. It wasn’t until I printed a paper copy at the final size that I could see that the font was larger than it needed to be.
In this frame I’ve dropped a scan my pen and watercolour into a layout that I’ve set up in the comic strip creation program Manga Studio EX5.
Although in this second version the type looks rather small on screen, it is still a bit larger than is necessary to make it legible in print but it’s small enough to give a bit of breathing space around the speech bubbles.
I saved the first image in RGB (red, green, blue) format, the recommended method for viewing on screen, the second in CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) which supposedly gives the best results when printing but I prefer the colour cast of RGB, even on the printed version from my colour laser. Neither version manages to capture the transparency of the original watercolour artwork. A professional printer will, I’m sure, make a better job of it.
The typeface is Hannotate SC Regular, set in a italics in the second version. I might hand letter the final version but for the moment this is a useful way of setting up the design of each frame of the comic strip. There might be a few tweaks to script and it will be easier to accommodate those if I don’t commit to hand written text at this stage.
With my comic strip project underway I see the world differently. I’m more aware of people in action in colour. But there’s the problem; in the minute it takes for a shopper to trundle along the high street with her trolley or for a cinema-goer to walk to his seat with that vital cup of coffee, I’ve barely time to sketch the basic details, let alone add colour.
I need some kind of colour shorthand but if, for instance, I scribble down ‘bl’ I can find myself wondering later whether I meant blue or black. Similarly ‘gr’ could stand for green or grey.
So how about using the CMYK colour printing process to distinguish the primary colours? Cyan, magenta, yellow and black. The ‘K’, as far as I can discover, stands for the ‘key’ or ‘keyline’ colour, the one that, in the four-colour process, brings the three primaries together by adding a ‘keyline’ to define the image (and to give a bit of solidity to what would otherwise be a rather pastel image).
When I was working on my Richard Bell’s Britain sketchbook, I always used Pelikan Special Brown indian ink for lettering and for the vast majority of my drawings, so Collins experimented by replacing the black that they’d normally use in the printing process with the Pantone equivalent of Special Brown.
This warmed up the colour in my drawings compared with the originals and by printing on slightly tinted paper we ended up with a book that looked slightly nostalgic, which wasn’t really my aim. The other extreme, which we also experimented with, would have been to print on the pure white paper that they used for field guides but that gave a rather stark zingy look to my drawings.
At last, I’m getting started on the final artwork for the Charles Waterton comic strip project. I’m starting with the confrontation between Waterton and Mr Simpson the soap manufacturer, whose factory in Walton village has polluted air and stream and killed trees in the Waterton’s park.
Did the soap works look anything like the scene I imagined in my rough? I’ve been unable to track down a photograph of the factory as it was, so using a map in Peter Wright’s 1985 book A History of Walton I made a 3D model in Sketchup.
The factory was built on a triangle of land between the Barnsley Canal and Shay Lane. Shay Lane runs eastwards out of the village towards Crofton. I tried to use the satellite image from Google Earth as my starting point but that got a bit fiddly as I’m not familiar with the program so I started with a blank and drew out the buildings on the ground plane by eye, then I extruded them up into 3D objects using the Push Pull Tool.
With the two chimneys this isn’t so very different to the scene I conjured up from imagination but it’s not quite what I need for the showdown scene, so I’ll take the essential features from it and bring them together to make it a bit more dramatic.
A photograph taken after the factory closed shows that the canal ran past the soap works on an embankment, so the barges were passing by at roof level.