Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
I’ve gone for Gothick with this Clip Studio Paint iPad drawing. 3D-drawing figure posed in Clip Studio (I’m getting the hang of how the joints work). I added flat tones in Clip Studio then used the Magic Wand tool, Fill and a gradient for the background.
Still grappling with primitive geometric shapes in Clip Studio Paint.
I used an line/tone conversion on a photograph I’d taken at Newmillerdam for the background for these characters drawn for a Clip Studio Paint Tutorial.
I’ve tried to get a screen print effect with the colour on my sketch of the pointsettia.
This Sketchboard Pro, which arrived this afternoon, is a big improvement on the drawing board propped up on an offcut of decking that I’ve been using.
To test it out, I drew one of the frames for my Bilberry Wood comic. It holds the drawing board at just the angle I like and it’s so robust that it doesn’t slip around slightly, like my previous makeshift arrangement.
I’m enjoying adding the colour, and I think the flat colours are going to work. The Ruskin panel will be just 7 cm (2.75 inches) across, so, as I said yesterday, it shouldn’t be too fussy.
Darwin’s fossiliferous strata in this panel remind me of when I worked on Yorkshire Rock, and make me think about tackling something in similar style.
I’ve been wanting to write one of my Dalesman Wild Yorkshire nature diaries about Bilberry Wood for a while. I’ve taken plenty of photographs of the trees, mosses, ferns and wild flowers and read up about the history of woodland in the Dales but I’ve struggled not to make my regular style of article sound like a botanical survey. Which it is, I guess.
As an experiment, I’m trying a comic format, putting myself into the picture instead to get over a sense of how much fun it is to yomp through a sometimes rather boggy Dales wood, instead of going for the detached all seeing, all knowing narrator that I’d normally aim to pass myself off as in a magazine article.
As for once I hadn’t taken my sketchbook with me, I literally drew with a digit yesterday, using a finger on my iPhone screen in Tayasui Sketches Pro (left) as we sat with a mint and lime drink in the shaded courtyard of Horbury’s Flamingo Teapot Cafe but after all the large-scale pen and watercolour work that I’ve done for my Redbox Gallery show, I felt that it was about time I tried drawing with my Apple Pencil on my iPad Pro again.
The man in the hat and the sumac were drawn in Adobe Fresco, using its virtual ‘Blake’ pen for the drawing.
Would I find it easier if I used a matt screen protector, like Paperlike, on my iPad, to give it a more natural feel? Or a rubberised tip for the Apple Pencil, to give it a hint of resistance as it moves over the glass screen?
Drawing on the iPad is never going to be as familiar to me as pen on paper but I’m keen to have the best possible image so I’d have to avoid any matt screen protector because it adds a very slight amount of colour fringing to the image.
British summertime starts today and we’re making a start exploring our local patch. Rather than sketch or take photographs I’m drawing my comic strip from remembered details.
To try some unfamiliar features of Clip Studio Paint, I’ve followed a tutorial for drawing a black and white comic strip, adding tone, patterns and a sunburst effect to the frames. I drew using a graphics pad and desktop iMac, so my lines are wobbling about all over the place but I should now be able to do a final version on my iPad Pro.
If I was working from life, I’d want to indicate every bramble bush in the moat and every hawthorn growing on the motte at Sandal Castle but, as I’m more interested in the structure of the earthworks, I need to simplify.
I’ll add shadows and highlights to build up a three-dimensional effect. For the stippling to represent the vegetation I’ve used a virtual brush with the appropriate name of ‘Seurat’ in the Adobe Fresco drawing app. I’ll use a dry brush following the contours to further emphasise the form.
This is my first attempt to use Apple’s Sidecar mode which is a feature introduced with the latest operating system, Catalina, that enables me to use my iPad Pro as a second screen for my iMac. Here I’ve dragged just the central workspace window from the iMac version of Clip Studio Paint onto the iPad, leaving the Layers Palette, Toolbar etc on the iMac. Rather disconcerting, but it works.
I’m trying out the 3D posable figures in Clip Studio, using them to get the proportions and drawing on a layer above them.
So far, it doesn’t feel as direct as drawing in a program such as Procreate or Adobe’s new Fresco on the iPad itself, but I’ll keep using it so that I get familiar with it, because I’m sure it’s going to be useful as a way of using an Apple Pencil on an iMac only program.
Using your iPad as a second display for your Mac with Sidecar
To ease myself back into book design, I’m trying out Pages, Apple’s word-processor, which you can use to create e-books. I’ve gone for the ‘Traditional Novel’ template and, to keep things simple, I’m sticking to the design as far as possible. So far, I’ve only had to change the colour of the title, so that it shows up against my photograph.
I took the photograph on a visit to Sewerby Hall on Wednesday. I’d already decided on my subject, so I was on the look-out for a vintage armchair. Most of the furniture in the Hall is on loan from the Victoria & Albert Museum and has been carefully chosen to recreate the interiors as they appear in photographs taken in the Hall’s Edwardian heyday.
My holiday reading during our short break at Bridlington was a paperback of a Vera novel by crime-writer Ann Cleeves. The paperback’s cover features a glowering monochrome landscape, so I’ve gone for a similar treatment for my photograph, using various filters in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop CC 2019.
I’ve used Lightroom’s ‘black and white split tone’, with added grain and some vignetting. When I took the photograph (having first checked with the attendant that photography was allowed), I had to crouch down to get the angle on the chair that I was after. This meant that the perspective of the paneling in the background was skewed, so I’ve used Photoshop’s ‘Edit/Transform/Skew’ command to straighten it up.
The author’s name was randomly generated in my favourite writing program, Scrivener. The original story, The Chair, is by my sister. It appears in an old school magazine which I came across recently.
Apple Pages ‘Create and collaborate on documents that are beautiful beyond words’ . . . such as my mystery story cover!
Adobe Creative Cloud: includes Lightroom CC and Photoshop CC
Scrivener ‘the go-to app for writers of all kinds’