Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
A confused Great Dane attempts to take a drink from the pond below Joiners Wood. On the Lower Lake mallards and a single mute swan have gathered in the one corner that is still ice free. A shoveler drake and two females rest at the edge on the ice.
By midday the sun has got out and the expanse of white parkland in front of the house has turned green, with just a few frosty patches remaining in the shade of trees.
The low winter sunlight was perfect for macro photography, so I took my Olympus E-M10II fitted with a macro lens to Newmillerdam this morning.
Going through the Clip Studio Paint tutorial, from storyboard to draft.
The final panels drawn, hand-drawn borders added and a hopefully subtle paper texture added. Hope my editor likes it but, if not, I can soon adapt it to a regular nature diary format.
The flat colour that I like for my figures and cartoon animals doesn’t suit the straightforward natural history I’m including in the comic, so I’ve gone for gentler watercolour effect in Clip Studio Paint. As the colour is on a separate layer from the line drawing it’s easy to start again with a fresh layer to try alternatives.
This Sketchboard Pro, which arrived this afternoon, is a big improvement on the drawing board propped up on an offcut of decking that I’ve been using.
To test it out, I drew one of the frames for my Bilberry Wood comic. It holds the drawing board at just the angle I like and it’s so robust that it doesn’t slip around slightly, like my previous makeshift arrangement.
I’m enjoying adding the colour, and I think the flat colours are going to work. The Ruskin panel will be just 7 cm (2.75 inches) across, so, as I said yesterday, it shouldn’t be too fussy.
Darwin’s fossiliferous strata in this panel remind me of when I worked on Yorkshire Rock, and make me think about tackling something in similar style.
Adding flat tone, texture and colour: as this is destined for an A5 sized page, flat tone might work better than subtle effects, but for now I’m leaving these frames as they are. If any one of them stands out as looking out of place on the final spread I can go back to it.
After so much drawing on the iPad, it’s a good feeling to go back to pen on paper in my pocket-sized sketchbook.
Chris and Fiona get the cartoon treatment in the final panel of ‘Bilberry Wood’. For colouring I’ve discovered a useful new (to me) tool in Clip Studio Paint, the ‘Direct Draw, Lasso Fill’.
A special guest artist in the Bilberry Wood comic today: instead of drawing my version of Ruskin’s illustration from Elements of Drawing, I dropped in a scan of his original.
But I redrew Charles Darwin’s sketch of his Tree of Life. This is the inking stage, colour to follow.