Category: Art

Wood Pigeon Screen Test

wood pigeon cartoons

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.

wood pigeon roughs

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 . . .

Wood pigeon mouth positions
Wood pigeon mouth movements – and yes, I know that they don’t really have teeth! – drawn same size as my original sketch.

Squirrel Screen Test

squirrel cartoons

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.

Ducking

duck cartoons

We’ve started shooting, and the duck’s looking a bit worried about that.

I’ve dived in to the mysteries of Adobe Character Animator and I like the way the simple ‘puppets’ that you create in the program can be so expressive. Other aspects such as how to stop the character floating about are a mystery – although the duck might be quite relieved to hear that.

Lip-sync and bill-sync are working well though.

Ode to a Duck

duck
T'was the last week of summer
And, down by the lake,
We hear the sad quack
Of a hungry old drake.
grebe
The grebes and the tufted ducks
Dabble and dive
But our poor drake is struggling
Just to survive.
juvenile grebe
The foraging moorhen
Has plenty of luck,
But that doesn't extend
To the desolate duck.
goose
In the woods, the grey squirrels
Eat beech-nuts galore,
But our poor drake is starving
Down here on the shore.
grebe and duck

I know what you’re thinking:
‘I’ll give him some bread!’ –
But just one mouldy bread crust
Can leave a duck dead.

ducks
This ode to a duck
Might not be the best,
But what were you expecting? -
I'm not Colin West!
duck

Cartoon ducks drawn at Newmillerdam this morning. We didn’t see any drake mallards in breeding plumage, so my guess is that they’re all in eclipse plumage, and we’ll see their true colours appear in the autumn.

Lost in Space

spaceman animation

James, appearing on my most recent homemade birthday card, is the plucky test pilot for my latest experiment in animation. Like the fox, this was adapted from an existing pen and watercolour comic, using Clip Studio Paint on the iMac and on my iPad Pro. It’s a whole lot easier to cut out the component parts using an Apple Pencil for the Selection Pen and Eraser.

Slightly Foxed

fox animated gif

My thanks to Tielmanc for his step-by-step tutorial Animate Your Existing Characters | Keyframes Tutorial, which popped up in a Clip Studio Paint e-mail yesterday. He makes the point that you don’t need to redraw a character to animate it, just carefully break up your drawing into component parts and fill in the missing areas.

His example was a farmer dog, so I’ve gone for this cartoon I drew of the fox that visits our garden.

Now that I’m not completely foxed about the principles involved, I can go on to something more ambitious.

Link

Animate Your Existing Characters | Keyframes Tutorial

Browning Trail Camera

Trail cam

We’ve been leaving our new trail cam, the Browning Strike Force Pro XD, at the end of our garden, strapped to the compost bins.

Not much to report from last night apart from the usual dunnocks, house sparrows and a juvenile blackbrd.

fox

Rain seems to be enough to put off foxes from wandering around our garden, but we caught one on camera yesterday at quarter past four in the morning.

fox

What appears to be the same fox had wandered through a few hours earlier, at 11.30 p.m.

Lakeside Haiku

haiky
Drake mallard dabbles
and preens on the willow bough
A soft feather drifts

This morning at the lakeside at Newmillerdam I’m trying a haiku.

notebook

I made three pages of notes, then went for the main observations that appealed to me, fitting them into the three lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables.

Published
Categorized as Drawing