Here’s my finished gnome comic strip with speech balloons added and, a final flourish, a couple of subtle glows. I’ve still got a lot to learn about Clip Studio Paint but at least I’ve gone through all the stages of Kamakiki Mai’s tutorial, plus a few extras such as the speech bubbles.
Gnome Tony is the first gnome that you meet on the Gnome Roam at Newmillerdam Country Park and this strip is based on an incident I saw on a morning’s walk during the last half term holiday. Beware the Wrath of the Gnome! Tony has friends dotted around throughout the park . . . you have been warned!
I used my iPad to photograph these textures in the garden: wood grain on the shed, wood chip on the path and lichens on sandstone. There’s also a swatch of watercolour paper and one of our dining room carpet. By importing an image into Clip Studio Paint, I can superimpose the texture on my artwork.
I superimposed the watercolour paper over the whole image then scaled the lichens, vertical wood grain, wood chip and carpet onto the individual panels. The horizontal wood grain was superimposed on the title. I used the ‘Overlay’ setting for each layer and reduced the opacity to about 50% except in the case of the wood chip on the falling boy panel, which worked better on the ‘Screen’ setting, probably because there is more contrast in the wood chip image.
Just the speech bubbles to go in now and I’m finished! I’ve learnt so much from Kamakiki Mai’s tutorial.
It seemed a long process, building up the flat colours each in its own layer – trees, figures, gnome, ground – but when it comes to painting with a virtual watercolour brush to add light and shade, I can see the point of all that preparation. There’s a ‘lock transparent pixels’ button, which sounds technical but it means that, if, for instance, you’re painting a shadow on one of the figures, your shading won’t spill over onto the background.
I’m working on the big screen of my iMac Retina desktop computer, painting using my Wacom intuos 4 graphics tablet. To change colour I’ve been selecting the eye-dropper tool from the menu in Clip Studio. How useful it would be if I could alternate between watercolour brush and eye-dropper by clicking the lever on the Wacom stylus. I tried clicking it and discovered that the lever is already set to activate that particular shortcut!
Wacom stylus, with that handy shortcut lever, which I’ve just started to use today after I’ve had my intuos 4 tablet for seven years!
That speeds things up a lot and the other refinement that I’ve been able to include, thanks to my large screen is to float a large version of the Colour Wheel Palette on my workspace, so that I can easily select lighter, darker or more colourful versions of any flat colour that I sample.
One final improvement is that I’ve specified and saved a virtual watercolour brush, which I’ve called ‘My Even Watercolour’. Unlike the default ‘Transparent Watercolour Brush’ that I’d normally use, it doesn’t lift a small amount of colour from a previously painted background, as a real-life watercolour brush would. To adapt this new brush with a few tweaks from the regular ‘Transparent Watercolour Brush’, I followed Kamakili Mai’s instructions in the step-by-step tutorial that I started going through yesterday.
Adding flat colours is one of the pleasures of creating a comic in Clip Studio Paint but I found setting it up for the first time a bit technical so I needed to do a bit of searching online and watching YouTube videos to find some of the features which can be ‘hidden’, lurking in sub-menus. But once I got going the paint bucket worked well. It has a ‘paint unfilled areas’ options for getting the odd spots that inevitably get missed on the first pass.
The next stage is to add more colour using a virtual watercolour brush to get a bit of light and shade into the frames and I also want to try adding texture and a gradient.
There are also a couple of speech bubbles to add. The story seems to me to be self-explanatory without them, but it’s another technique that I want to practice.
Rather than drawing well, it’s important to draw what you enjoy.
Kamakiri Mai
In a step-by-step guide to creating an illustration in Clip Studio Paint, the Tokyo-based designer Kamakiri Mai suggests that it’s important to enjoy creating the rough draft for your illustration and not to worry too much about drawing well. She’ll even do a bit of writing to help create a back story for the imagined world of her illustration, even though that isn’t going to figure in the final artwork.
You can see that I’m not worrying about drawing well as I work out a four-panel comic based on an incident that amused me as I walked along the Gnome Roam trail at Newmillerdam a few weeks ago. My aim is to go through the process of telling a simple story as clearly as I can.
I’ve been doing a lot of drawings on my iPad recently but I’m surprised how many illustrators alternate between drawing on paper and designing on the computer. For example, my workflow so far has been:
draw the pencil rough
scan the rough into Clip Studio and draw the panels using the panel border tools
print out the blank panels at exactly the same size as my roughs
put the roughs on my light pad and trace the figures in pencil
ink over the pencil
The next stage will be to scan the line art into Clip Studio and start adding areas of flat colour
I wouldn’t want my drawings to look too perfect but I’m frustrated when they turn out too shaky so, since we got back from Rome a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been trying to do something about that and I decided to see if cutting down on my caffeine would make any difference. So far it seems to be working well. I can’t give up my morning coffee but most places can now offer a reasonable decaffeinated version.
My Home Gym
I’ve also been keeping up with the suggestions for exercises in the books that I read recently by Dr Chatterjee, which I’m hoping are improving my posture when I’m sitting at my desk or drawing. They should also help with movement as they’re designed to activate muscle groups, in my shoulders for instance, that might otherwise be neglected.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve bought myself an aerobic step, as recommended by Dr Chatterjee for improving balance. It sits in the corner of my studio under the bookshelf along with some dumbbells. The step was just £12 from Argos, the dumbbells £5 from Aldi, which makes them a bit of a bargain compared with gym membership. I do only about five minutes exercise a day so I couldn’t even get to my nearest gym in the time that it takes to go through a simple routine.
Eighteen months ago, I had a brief suspected TIA (transient ischaemic attack), which I now suspect might have been an unusual migraine or just the result of getting up too quickly after an overlong session on the computer. Because it was transient even the experts can’t say for sure. As a result I got myself a FitBit fitness tracker. I’m giving it a break now because I feel that it’s done it’s job of making us aware of how many or how few steps we might do in a day and it hasn’t shown up any problems with my heart rate.
During our three and a half days in Rome two weeks ago, we walked the equivalent of a marathon, according to Barbara’s iPhone: 70,000 paces, 43 km (0ver 26 miles), so I think that we’re fine for walking and, for me, it’s slouching at my desk and shaky hands that I want to tackle next.
Just my Cup of Tea
So at Blacker Hall farm shop this morning we both went for decaffeinated lattes and, it might just be coincidence, but my drawing of the old beams seemed that bit steadier than when I’ve drawn them on previous occasions.
I do feel a bit calmer. I’d describe the difference, when I need to perform a smooth movement, such as drinking from a full cup of coffee or starting a drawing, like this:
Before: I’d tense up and attempt to rigidly control my movement
Now: I feel more relaxed and happier to go with the flow
It’s early days so there’s no way of knowing whether it’s cutting down on caffeine or doing the exercises has been of any benefit. Perhaps it’s just getting over the excitement of our break in Rome and recovering from a cold. Whatever it is, I think it’s worth carrying on for a while.
I’ve gone back to ink cartridges in my Safari fountain pen. The Lamy Ink is freer-flowing than my regular Noodlers, but I don’t have the option of adding a watercolour wash. This fireplace is at my niece Hannah’s Victorian terraced house and I wondered if it was original, but no, it’s a modern gas fire replica, which goes well with house, as does the tile surround.
Sofa at my brother-in-law John’s house
Tree at Blacker Hall farm shop, Monday.
I feel that I have to press on just a bit to get the line that I’m after with the Noodler’s but in contrast with the fountain-pen ink, I can glide the nib lightly over the surface and pick up some of the texture of the cartridge paper in the line.
Before I consign my 1971 student notebook back to the attic, I couldn’t resist showing you this. I don’t remember drawing it but it seems to be nothing more than a doodle that got elaborated when I should have been working on my thesis. The space suits are from 2001: A Space Odyssey and from the Frank Hampson era of Dan Dare. The astro-physicist bears a slight resemblance to Hermann Bondi.
Had I drawn the Gamma Cygni Outpost as a more elongated asteroid, I could have claimed to have predicted the interstellar object Oumuamua, which passed through our solar system in 2017. I don’t know where the name Salodrin came from. I’m sure it’s not from any science-fiction story that I’d been reading.
Sadly, this is as far as the mission got, so the ‘beyond’ in the title is misleading. So often when I look back at the ideas that I worked on just for fun, I think, why didn’t I take this further?
I’ve mentioned before how much of an influence the springy pen and ink illustrations of Victor Ambrus were on me as a student and I’ve just come across a brief account that I made in a student notebook of an occasion when I was lucky enough to get to speak to him.
Doodle from my notebook/sketchbook where I’m trying out Ambrus’s technique of adding finger prints to a drawing.
At the Leeds Children’s Book Fair, on Tuesday 16 November 1971, I slipped in at the back of the audience of children for a talk given by Victor and another historical illustrator/writer Ian Ribbons. As I walked in, Victor had just fired the flintlock pistol that he’d brought along with him; a sure way to get everyone listening!
As the smoke cleared, he explained:
“I like drawing historical pictures because I am able to go to town on the costumes and more interesting things seemed to happen in those days.”
Ian Ribbons was the author and illustrator of a series of books about events around the world on one particular date in history. As part of the research for Monday, 21 October 1805, The Day of Trafalgar, he’d climbed the mast and drawn from the crow’s nest of HMS Victory:
“The point is that you never know what you might be doing next.”
Ambrus-inspired drawing from my diary a couple of days after the book fair. I studied his illustrations in books that I borrowed from the children’s section in Leeds City Library. This was my impression of a character in Barbara Leonie Picard’sTwice Read Tales, illustrated by Ambrus.
But coming back to Victor Ambrus, as I’ve said before, I was convinced that if I could use the exact same nib and paper that he used, I too might be draw like him, so when it came to questions from the audience, I asked him about art materials:
“I use ordinary layout paper for my drawings so that the printers can copy it but of course for colour you have to experiment a little but I use the same sort of paints that you would use at school.”
The real ‘secret’ of Victor’s work is that he can draw.
Quentin Blake, Blue Peter and Big Chief I-Spy
The previous day I’d seen, for the first time, Quentin Blake in action, drawing animals on request for a group of children. His giraffe ran to three sheets of his A2 layout pad. I sat quietly at the back, so unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to request a drawing. A year later, he would be one of my tutors in the Illustration Department at the Royal College of Art.
I was so lucky with my tutors right through college. On the morning of the day that I saw Quentin at work, I ‘talked with Derek Hyatt about composition’ and the following day before my return visit I had a music tutorial with Alan Cuckston (I was working on a project about the Yorkshire composer William Baines, 1899-1922).
After the Ambrus talk I saw another familiar face at the book fair:
‘As I walked away I saw someone smiling at me – it was Peter Purves of Blue Peter.’
And was there someone else?: ‘Also nearly walked into Big Chief I-Spy? I don’t think so.’
The I-Spy books were one of my early influences, with their encouragement to children to get out spotting, jotting and drawing. I won several prizes in the I-Spy summer holiday competitions. There was a daily I-Spy column in the Daily Mail and during August the Big Chief set something to find and to write about every day. I’ve still got my prize-winning books and I’ve never grown out of the habit of getting out and just looking.
Coffee break at the Caffe delle Carroze, Vatican Museums.
Vatican Museums day ticket: Plato (a portrait of Leonardo da Vinci) and Aristotle, the central philosophers in Raphael’s ‘School of Athens’
Raphael’sSchool of Athens was my favourite painting in the Vatican Museums. Michelangelo’sLast Judgement seemed so overblown and vindictive by comparison. It was my first opportunity to take a close look at the paintwork which was fresh and understated, not super smooth as you might expect from a Raphael.
But Morandi’s still lives – one of which included a blue cylindrical mallet alongside his more usual muted-colour domestic objects – seemed more moving to me than the grand set pieces. Although he went for such apparently simple subjects, Morandi was as philosophical about his subject matter as Raphael and Michelangelo:
Morandi, Natura Morta
I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see. We know that all we can see of the objective world, as human beings, never really exists as we see and understand it. Matter exists, of course, but has no intrinsic meaning of its own, such as the meanings that we attach to it. We can know only that a cup is a cup, that a tree is a tree.
Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964)
The ‘Unswept Floor’ Mosaic
The artist Heraclitus, who designed the ‘unswept floor’ mosaic made by Sosos of Pergamon, Greece, was equally skilled in evoking our confusion between appearance and reality. I wonder how many times a servant, sweeping up after a real banquet, mistook the actual debris of feasting for one the playful depictions of discarded shells, bones, fruits and nuts.
It was found in the ruins of a villa on the Aventine Hill in Rome, built during the reign of Emperor Hadrian, (117 to 138 A.D.) but the mosaic has been dated to three centuries earlier.
The magnificent spiral staircase that leads from the museum shop down to the exit reminds me of the spiral of the snail shell on the mosaic . . . but also of the Nine Circles of Hell in Dante’s Inferno, a timely reminder to us all as we prepare to make our exits!
Links
Vatican Museums, you can book online to avoid the queues, although there weren’t any long queues when we arrived at about 9.45 a.m., and I’d recommend going as early as you can manage and preferably at a quieter time of year.
