Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
The last of the supporting players, the tufted duck is taking shape and I’ve made a start on the main character, the hungry duck.
Ode to a Duck shouldn’t take long to put together now that I’ve got all the elements together. The animation shouldn’t be much longer than 60 seconds.
We’ve got most of the Newmillerdam ecosystem appearing in Ode to a Duck. It took me a while to work out how to stop my characters floating around – you simply pin their feet to the background – but that hasn’t been a problem with these two.
Joining the swan for the prologue, this Canada goose. I haven’t given him moving eyes and eyebrows, but he seems suitably goose-like without them.
In my animation, the swan is anything but mute as it introduces my Ode to a Duck.
Having now produced several ‘puppets’ using the Adobe Character Animator template, I’m much more familiar with the basics and more confident that it will actually work. There are plenty of optional tweaks that I could introduce but for this animated cartoon I’ve stuck to face-on characters which don’t walk or fly about, basically they’re talking heads.
This two thousand year-old ‘Iron Age God’ presides over the National Park Tourist Information Centre in Castleton.
These bison bones are from the Pleistocene Ice Age, more than 10,000 years old. The bison leg bones were excavated at Windy Knoll, a mile and a half to the west of the village, at the top end of Winnats Pass.
“Are they keeping still for you?” asks a passing dog-walker.
“Whenever you draw a duck, if you start when it’s facing that way, it turns the other way.”
Down at the duck pond in Thornes Park and what I really need to draw are Canada geese and swans but there are none about so I draw these balletic gulls and preening ducks.
All the work that I’ve been doing on animated cartoons makes me more aware of character and movement in birds, particularly ducks, but I realise that black-headed gulls and town pigeons could equally well have a cartoon to themselves.
My Ode to a Duck animation is going to be a biodiversity hotspot: here are the latest recruits, the moorhen and coot. It’s surprising how these characters take on a life of their own: I’d never thought of a moorhen as being a bit of a spiv or of a coot being an ingenue.
This morning at Newmillerdam I drew the fishing platform for the opening frame of my Ode to a Duck cartoon and photographed a beech tree for this background for the squirrel/wood pigeon duo. You can already sense the natural chemistry between them.
For his waddle-on cameo in my Ode to a Duck cartoon, the wood pigeon is supposed to be empathic and concerned rather than ranting and irate, but, if you’re familiar with wood pigeons you’ll know that they have a limited repertoire.
The line work was drawn in Lamy fountain pen in my sketchbook. I’ve combined two of my sketches and coloured them in Photoshop. I kept testing the Photoshop PSD file in Adobe Character Animator, to make sure things were turning out more or less as intended.
I haven’t added the blink yet, as I did for the squirrel this morning, but this character is evidently the unblinking sort.
Next up, a foraging moorhen . . .
I got the mouth working yesterday, this morning the eyes and, who knows, I might eventually get that bushy tail swishing around.
My latest sketchbook-to-screen character is the beech mast-gathering squirrel, partially inspired by seeing enthusiastic gardener and seed-collector Carol Klein on last night’s Gardeners’ World. I’d love to get her to do the voice-over.