Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
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.
My latest Ode to a Duck screen test and the great-crested grebe is struggling with his motivation in scene 2.
Using Adobe Character Animator and Photoshop, I’ve used a sketchbook drawing as the basis for my ‘puppet’. So, just the beak-sync to add . . . all 14 mouth movements.
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.
T'was the last week of summer And, down by the lake, We hear the sad quack Of a hungry old drake.
The grebes and the tufted ducks Dabble and dive But our poor drake is struggling Just to survive.
The foraging moorhen
Has plenty of luck,
But that doesn't extend
To the desolate duck.
In the woods, the grey squirrels
Eat beech-nuts galore,
But our poor drake is starving
Down here on the shore.
I know what you’re thinking:
‘I’ll give him some bread!’ –
But just one mouldy bread crust
Can leave a duck dead.
This ode to a duck Might not be the best, But what were you expecting? - I'm not Colin West!
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.
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.
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.
Animate Your Existing Characters | Keyframes Tutorial
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.
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.
What appears to be the same fox had wandered through a few hours earlier, at 11.30 p.m.
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.
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.
I’ve gone Cinerama format for my latest birthday card which continues the Lost in Space theme of the previous card.
How would you serve afternoon tea in zero G?
Much as we like our homemade bread it doesn’t keep long at this time of year so while the wood pigeon tucked into that (see the greatest hits from of the 103 selfies it took of itself on my new trail cam in my next post), we enjoyed the roast Mediterranean veg sandwich at the Cafe Capri.
While we’re in Horbury, we check out my Addingford display in the Redbox Gallery in the old telephone box on Queen Street. I’m pleased that the foamboard artwork isn’t buckling too much under the summer sun and that I can see the Addingford Steps artwork and map so well on the back wall, then I realise that the reason that I can see them is because the two stork cut-outs, suspended on fishing line, have fallen down behind Joby’s riverbank.
I’ll reinstate them, but I’ll draw the birds again at half the size, so they don’t blot out the display at they did previously.
