Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
I’m drawing our sparrow nestbox for a forthcoming article in The Dalesman and, rather than draw it from life or trace it from a photograph, I’m trying freehand perspective. I didn’t draw an horizon line or plot vanishing points, I just drew as near to the way they appear in a photograph.
Having used ruler and set square for the pencil, I’ll use my usual freehand fountain pen for the drawing itself, so hopefully it will looked relaxed but plausible.
A marine theme for today’s homemade birthday card. Tempted to do the inshore stations next . . .
I like the printed look that you get using flat colours so I’ve been going through a tutorial on digital colouring. It should work well in my printed publications.
You scan your pen and ink drawing in black and white drawing at 600 dpi, using the ‘text’ setting. This is to avoid the slightly fuzzy ‘anti-aliased’ edges you’d get using the regular 300 dpi colour or grayscale settings. In Adobe Photoshop you can then go to the Channels palette (above) and press that first button at the bottom of the palette ‘Load Channel as Selection’.
Invert the selection and, on a new layer and fill with the foreground colour. For a comic strip you’d fill with pure black but here I’ve filled with brown.
Lock this line art layer you’ve created add the flat colours on separate layers, with shading, as on the wall in my top illustration, on another layer.
I tried the ‘Load Channel as Selection’ with my finished colour version then, after inverting it as before, filled it with black, producing this grayscale version.
To give the gatepost a black and white treatment, I marked the shapes of the shadows – the spot blacks as they’re called in comics – with an ‘x’, then filled in with a Pentel Brush Pen. Drawn using a Lamy nexx with a bold nib.
Another busy week for birthdays.
Looking at Hilary’s cafe from the garden you can guess which was the original cottage and in what order the adjacent cottage, lean-to extensions and extensions of extensions were added.
After my practice at cross-hatching using a dip pen on a tilted drawing board, I looked around for an object to draw and went for this Lowe Alpine haversack.
The wind has just changed from mild, from the mid-Atlantic, to cold from the north-east, so I sat with a latte to warm me up as I started this drawing at the Boathouse Cafe at Newmillerdam this morning. I used my Lamy nexx fountain pen but I think, now I’ve scanned them both in ‘text’ mode, pure black and white, that it would be hard to spot the difference between this and the dip pen in the haversack drawing.
The black areas were brushed in later from a photograph I’d taken on my phone, outlined with a Rotring Tikky Graphic pigmented ink pen and filled with a number 10 Prolene series 101 synthetic brush using the Rohrer’s india ink which I used with the dip pen.
In Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, Jessica Abel and Matt Madden recommend drawing with your board angled at approximately 60 degrees. My old cast iron letterpress gives me just the right angle to prop the board against, which I’m resting on my knees. My parallel motion drafting board can’t be manoeuvred to that angle.
They also recommend always drawing with arm movements when you’re working in pen, so definitely not my the finger movements that I always go for in my detailed work. I’m going to try some of the exercises they suggest for getting used to working with a dip pen.
It’s going to take a lot of getting used to but I like the feeling of making marks on what feels to me like a near-vertical surface. Bristol board, also recommended in Abel & Madden’s book, doesn’t tear as I scratch away with my dip pen and it gives a crisp line with no bleeding into the fibres of the paper surface.
Drawing Words & Writing Pictures website
I stuck to black and white at Newmillerdam this morning – a B-nib Lamy filled with De Atramentis ink and a Pentel brush pen.
When people are wearing bright yellow or blue, it’s tempting to add that as a flat wash but I’m experimenting with black and white for my werewolf comic, to create an inky gothic atmosphere.
Also as an experiment, I scanned these at 600 dpi (dots per inch) in ‘1 bit B/W’, reducing everything to either pure black or white.
For my werewolves project I need one or two French peasants who claim to have encountered a loup garou, so I’ve taken a look at Courbet’s Peasants from Flagey.
For the werewolf itself, I thought that the lean look of this wolf sculpture from Chatsworth might be the way to go.