Happy birthday to Paul. Who isn’t actually a pizza chef, but if he wanted a change from his day job he’d look the part in the uniform I’ve designed for his cartoon alter ego.
Paul’s Pizzeria
Category: Art
Every Sofa will be Famous for Fifteen Minutes
I used the ‘Image Trace’ function in Adobe Illustrator on my iMac to convert my pen and ink drawing of a sofa into a vectorised image. On a layer below I used the pen tool and – my new favourite – the blob brush to add a few areas of solid colour.
You can then re-colour the image either by changing colours individually or selecting the whole image and going for an alternative scheme from a colour theme library. Here I’ve used ‘Pop Art’, ‘Prehistoric’ and ‘Ice Cream’ (the one in chocolate and pistachio).
A Shed in the Snow
I converted this sketch of our shed in the snow in Illustrator for iPad. Instead of ‘Image Trace’ there’s a very similar vectorise function, which can convert it into something nearer to a woodcut or lino-cut.
Ink Sketches
I’ve just read Marcos Mateu-Mestre’s tale of medieval mercenaries, ‘Trail of Steel’, so I’ve tried to put a bit of his swashbuckling mayhem into my drawings of a sofa, a cruet and various piles of books and CDs.
I’ve been doing so many birthday cards recently that I’ve run out of De Atramentis black so I’ve moved on to the brown.
Junction Box
I drew this trackside junction box from a photograph in Adobe Illustrator. There’s a lot more planning involved in the process and mapping out shapes with the pen tool seems more like cutting shapes for a collage than drawing.
So far manipulating anchor points on the outlines of shapes seems rather random to me. I find it easy to inadvertently delete an anchor point and lose a section of the shape. Converting between an anchor that results in a straight line and one that results in a curve seems equally obscure.
The only way that I’ll learn is to keep practising.
Survival Kit
Just those bare necessities. Happy birthday to Daniel who last autumn located a log cabin with attached Boc Beag real ale beer pump at the head of a Scottish sea loch.
The Veg Test
Happy birthday to veg tester Emma.
Brambly
I’m not familiar with Adobe Illustrator, so it’s been a bit of learning curve, creating this ‘Brambly’ font using the Fontself Illustrator extension but I’m gradually getting into the logic of it but once I’d done that the font was available to be used in any program, such as here on a newsletter template in Apple Pages.
I wouldn’t use it for text like this but I can see the possibilities. I’d like to try and create a typeface that resembled my regular sketchbook lettering but to get into the process it’s going to be more fun to try a series of more illustrative fonts, where readability isn’t the main concern.
Link
Villagers
In Framed Ink 2, Marcos Mateu-Mestre suggests that the shape of the frame in a comic can help tell the story. This Clip Studio Paint sketch is a rough idea for the scene from The Book of Were-Wolves where the traveller, Sabine Baring-Gould, arrives at a small village in search of a pony and trap and meets the local curate and the village mayor.
I’ve drawn them as full figure character sketches but for this scene it’s the reaction of Monsieur le Curé and M. le Maire to a mysterious traveller that we’re interested in so we could got into letterbox format and make the traveller more mysterious by only including part of the figure.
When it comes to the discussion between M. le Curé and M. le Maire about how to deal with the traveller’s request I could go for a square head to head panel of just the two of them.
And when we meet Monsier le Maire for the first time he might merit a panel to himself, with a vertical format to show the full figure.
Inky Folk
Inspired by Marcos Mateu-Mestre’s Framed Ink, I’m going for a livelier, inkier look for my comic based on Sabine Baring-Gould’s The Book of Were-Wolves.
Rather than launch straight into drawing, I’m starting with a script, using Antony Johnson’s Comic Script Format template in Scrivener.
I’ve used Scrivener for writing articles for years, but always using a plain ‘Basic’ template, which isn’t very different to using a standard Microsoft Word document but Scrivener can do a lot more than that. The Comic Script Format makes it more like using screenwriting software, such as Final Draft.
Fox, Sparrow, Wood Pigeon
Thanks to Browning, I’m back in business with a replacement Strike Force Pro XD trail cam, so I’ve been catching up with the soap opera that is the wild side of our back garden.
As you can see, a male house sparrow has laid claim to the sparrow terrace nestbox, ousting the blue tits, who nested in hole 1 on the left last year. I love the puzzled expression on the blue tit’s face.
A persistent pigeon is waddling past the daffodils in pursuit of – he hopes – a mate.
Night visitors have included a cat and a vixen. I wonder if I’ll succeed in catching the cubs on camera this year?