Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
With all bars and pubs now closed until further notice, this Clip Studio Paint illustration was based on a pen and wash sketch from four or five years ago. As usual, as a drawing, I prefer the original sketch but I love the process of constructing a comic-style illustration, particularly when it gets to the final stage of dropping the tones in with the paint bucket tool.
I’m now onto the final part of my Clip Studio Paint Tips for Digital Outlining! tutorial by Eridey. I’m following a step by step demonstration of how to draw a female comic book character but basing my version on a 1985 sketch of Ruth, a communication design student at Leeds Polytechnic. I’m attempting to replace my tentative pen and wash with the graphic style of the tutorial, so my character is getting jet black hair instead of the fair hair of the original Ruth.
This is unfamiliar territory for me, so I’ll probably try working up several different sketches of people to get the feel of the process. Ultimately, I will use the techniques in my own way but first I want to understand how comic strip artists go about achieving their crisp and confident style.
I start with the G-pen, drawing the face and then, on a separate layer, the outline of the hair.
Next stage is to fill in the outline of the hair using the paint bucket tool. I draw the hands on another layer, on top of everything else, but initially you can see through to the layers below, so I need to create a layer mask, which in effect cuts a hand-shaped hole in the hair. It’s a technique that I’ve never used before, so that’s something new that I’ve learnt from going through the tutorial.
I then add individual strands of hair. The highlights are drawn using the G-pen loaded with transparent ‘ink’, rather than opaque white, so it’s like cutting into the area of black as you would when drawing on scraperboard.
Finally, on a base layer, I add tones of grey using the paint bucket tool. The simplified tones make me think of printmaking. But the original sketch is probably still my favourite!
Continuing with my Clip Studio Paint line drawing tutorial, this exercise, again closely based on an example in the Tips for Digital Outling! tutorial by Eridey, is intended to show how a thicker line can suggest that a subject is in the foreground.
The figure and the landscape are taken from two sketchbook drawings. The landscape is line for line like the original, except that I moved the house, which would have been hidden by the figure.
The man with the bag was a lightning sketch of a passer by but I had to change the perspective as my composition required a low viewpoint. As I firmed up details from the quick sketch, he became more of a countryman. With those hills behind him, I couldn’t help thinking that he might be a character in a James Herriot story.
Our coffee table, which always has a pile of magazines and books on it. I’m currently reading through Walt Stanchfield’s Drawn to Life, but this drawing is another in the Digital Outlining tutorial by Eridey which I’m following, thinking about how using a thicker line might draw attention to the subject of a comic strip frame. Eridey features a similar comic strip frame as an example in the tutorial, so I’ve done my own version, to try out the technique for myself.
According to John Ruskin in The Elements of Drawing, any variation in line is to be frowned upon – in his opinion it doesn’t add anything to the drawing itself – but animator Walt Stanchfield’s approach is that anything that helps a drawing tell a story is a good thing.
I love going through tutorials and as this one, a Clip Studio Paint tutorial, Tips for Digital Outling by Eridey, is especially appealing as it is more about drawing than technical details. My spheres have turned out wobbly and I know there’s a way around that, but that isn’t the point of the tutorial, it’s just the line drawing that we’re interested in here:
“The outline is a fundamental part of the illustration, sometimes it can be frustrating, especially when we see that our sketch looks better than the final version.”
Eridey
Yes, that’s a familiar feeling.
Tips for Digital Outlining Clip Studio Paint tutorial by Eridey
Every character who walked into the Farm Shop Cafe made me think that I’d like to try animating them. I’m currently reading Walt Stanchfield’s Drawn to Life, based on a long-running series of drawing classes that he arranged for Disney animators, inbetweeners and clean-up artists. My aim here was to try to catch gestures, which Stanchfield describes as mini-stories. His method is rather like the way that I attempt to draw people walking by: getting an instant impression of the whole pose and character. I think of it as taking a mental photograph, a test of memory, but Stanchfield wants us to develop the storytelling elements suggested in the pose, costume and character in that instant.
Having tried animating in Clip Studio Paint EX on my iPad Pro, I now feel much more at home using it for the much simpler process of designing a comic strip. Putting my random sketches into the frames of a Clip Studio comic strip immediately gets me thinking what could the story be here, even though I know these four people had no connection with each other. I added each pose to the frames at random, just to fill the grid that I was drawing as I went along.
The only conscious connection that I imposed was adding the bearded man to fill the left-hand side of the letterbox frame. That implied a conversation with the coffee-drinking man already occupying the right-hand side of the frame. I turned the eyes of the characters towards each other but resisted the urge to add word balloons, I’ll experiment with that in another sketchbook comic strip.
Note that, on Stanchfield’s advice, I’ve at last gone back to my sketchbook. This one is A5 portrait format; my pocket sized A6 sketchbook isn’t big enough for quick random sketches. I’d soon find myself running off the edge of the page.
“Collop Monday: pancake Tuesday: fruttis Wednesday, an hey for Thursday afternooin.”
‘Provincial Words in use at Wakefield’, collected by William Stott Banks, 1865.
‘COLLOP MONDAY, day before Shrove Tuesday.’, wrote W. S. Banks in 1865, ‘Children had a custom, and in some places have yet, of giving their School teacher bacon collops and eggs on this day. People thought no luck would attend them all the year if they did not dine on bacon collops this day.’
There are thirty-four individual drawings of hands and almost as many of the figure in this short animation, which lasts about four seconds.
It started off as a doodle of a man turning his head but moved further away from the cartoon original as I tried to get some expression into his face.
I drew it on my iPad Pro using an Apple Pencil in Clip Studio Paint EX. I’d been reading a tutorial about using Vector brushes so I’ve kept things simple and this has been drawn with the G-pen vector brush and the colour added on a separate layer using the Paint Bucket tool set to ‘Refer other layers’. As you can see here, the layers are treated as individual timelines in this program.
It’s usual to keep the timeline open for reference below the drawing but I might try my next animation with it above the drawing, because occasionally my hand would rest on a frame of the timeline and I’d find myself drawing on another cel.
I’ve got ‘Onion skinning’ turned on here. The blue outline represents the previous frame, the green the next frame.
Drawing all those individual frames of hands and faces has helped me get a feeling for the way the program works. It’s a time-consuming process but the traditional method of drawing every frame in an animation is closer to my sketchbook drawings than the previous methods that I’ve tried – such as Adobe Character Animator – which are often best approached as you would a cut-out animation.
After completing the animations based on my Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle, I’ve now turned to my 2011 paperback Wakefield Words based on Wakefield solicitor William Stott Banks’ 1865 collection of ‘Provincial Words in use at Wakefield. When I was working on the book, I enjoyed drawing the variety of subjects that he’d included. The pen and ink format is ideal for exploring various animation techniques that I want to try.
I’m surprised in this one that Banks records ‘toathre’ as meaning ‘two or three: a few’ as I would have thought it would have had the same meaning as ‘t’other’, meaning simply an alternative: ‘one or the other’.
With apologies for putting this snippet on a continuous loop, but it would be too short otherwise . . .
Please press pause before it drives you mad!
I’ve come back to an old favourite drawing program, Clip Studio Paint, which, in the EX, version can be used for animation on an iPad. It’s not as simple to use as the FlipaClip program that I experimented with the other day, but it offers far more possibilities when it comes to drawing, not that you’d realise that from this loop animation, which I’ve drawn simply to go through the stages of the process.
The thing that had me mystified was the relationship between frames, layers, folders and animation folders. If you can grasp that you can just get on with the drawing and track your progress in the animation instantly with the click of a button. It isn’t as difficult as it sounds, it’s just that it’s SO OBVIOUS that most YouTube tutorials don’t explain it clearly enough. Fighnimates‘ How to Animate in Clip Studio! (see link below) was the tutorial that finally enabled me to grasp the principle of using animation folders in the timeline.
The point about grasping the way layers work in the timeline is that I can have my background in one layer and my walking man in a separate layer above that. Getting the man to move for two seconds involved 24 separate drawings. Once I’d got the hang of all that, I realised that I could draw the man’s shadow on a separate layer below the man but above the background. Doing it that way, I didn’t have to worry about accidentally drawing over the silhouette of the man as I drew in the shadows. Of course the shadows also needed to be 24 separate drawings.
I believe that there is now an option to add a soundtrack in Clip Studio Paint, but in this case I stuck to the method that I’m familiar with and added it later when I’d exported the MP4 movie to Adobe Premiere Pro on my desktop iMac. The pair of trainers used to supply the sound effects for the bouncing ball and for the footsteps of camels crossing the Gobi Desert, once again came in for the man’s footsteps.
And I’m sure that my friend Karen Chalmers, who composed and performed the soundtrack for my Brief History of Rhubarb animation, would like me to make it clear that I’m the one who is responsible for the short solo performance on ocarina.
How to Animate in Clip Studio Paint! twenty minute video tutorial by Fighnimates