The shocking moment when Franklin Clinton gets banned from the Games Oscars for punching Mario.
Happy birthday Ben.
The Games Oscars
Category: Art
Pizza Noir
I’m reading Shawn Martinbrough’s How to Draw Noir Comics so I’m on the look out for seedy characters and bleak urban settings on the mean streets of Methley and Birstall.
He suggests that you should take photographs of characters, cars and ‘still lives’ – plants, tables and chairs. Set the camera to black and white because that gets you looking for compositions in dark and light.
There were several diners in Pizza Express who would have made suitable characters but I didn’t have the nerve to ask them if they’d mind being photographed and opted for a discrete sketch instead.
Paul’s Pizzeria
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.
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.