Man and Dog

man and dog
Okay, I’ll admit it, the perspective is way out: eye level must be approximately that of the top of the sign post in the background, so this man is about 10 feet tall!

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.

pointsettia

I’ve tried to get a screen print effect with the colour on my sketch of the pointsettia.

perspective
Trying the perspective ruler in Clip Studio Paint, in this case for a 2-point perspective.

Sketchboard Pro

sketchboard pro

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.

sheep cartppn

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.

Ruskin

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 cartoon

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.

Text and Pencils

Clip Studio Paint on iPad Pro
Drawing in Clip Studio Paint on my iPad Pro.

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.

Pencil rough drawn in Clip Studio Paint on my iPad Pro
Pencil rough drawn in Clip Studio Paint on my iPad Pro.

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.

rough of page
Starting inking and dividing the page into frames.

Digitally Drawn

Sketches Pro

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.

Paperlike

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?

Adobe Fresco sketch

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.

Summertime Walk

pony

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.

Simplifying Sandal

bailey

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.

Drawing in Sidecar Mode

Sidecar

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.

Fresco

My first drawing in Fresco. I like the cross hatching that I can get from one of the ‘Comic’ pens. There’s also a blotty pen and a ‘Blake’ pen, which I’m afraid doesn’t suddenly enable me to draw like Quentin Blake.
The ‘Belgian Comics’ brush in Fresco has yet to succeed in enabling me to draw like Herge, but it produces a stroke very like the ‘ligne claire’, clear line, of the Tintin stories.

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.

Links

Using your iPad as a second display for your Mac with Sidecar

Adobe Fresco, drawing program at the App Store

The Chair

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.

Apple Books on iPad
The book works well as a PDF in Apple’s Books app.

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.

Links

Sewerby Hall and gardens

The Chair, eBook on the iPad
The 1962 school magazine and the 2019 eBook version, looking great on my iPad.

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’

Vue 8: Island Chapel

Vue 8 3D landscape

I had good news from e-on software this week, they’ve made a start on reinstating their Cornucopia 3D website, which suffered a cyber attack in November 2017. Their online support soon helped me get my ten-year-old Vue Pioneer 8 3D landscape creation program back into action, so I’ve enjoyed going through the basics to build up this scene.

side elevation

The Vue workspace gives you a plan view of your scene, two side elevations and a main camera view. I dropped in ready-made trees, rocks and reedmace but for the little chapel-style building I used just one cube and one pyramid. I grouped these together and copied them three times then re-sized them to make the apse, porch and tower. And I worked out how to add some chiselled-in-stone lettering.

Rendering the final image is a long process as Vue traces rays of light from the main source, the virtual sun, then goes on to calculate how reflected light and atmospheric haze will affect the scene. I was surprised to see that the first stage of the render created what looks like a night scene. The transparency of the plum tree leaves works well.

Link

sketchbook

e-on software: the latest version of VUE Creator and PlantFactory Creator is available for twenty dollars a month, so for my purposes I’ll have to make do with my 2009 version of Vue Pioneer . . . but I might be tempted by the free trial!

The spiral stair and the sketchbook were created in earlier version of Vue, then known as Vue d’Espirit. The staircase actually made it onto the readers’ letters page in PC Format magazine in 2004. You can see that I’ve never lost my urge, as a teenager, to be a set designer.

Text Wrap

text wrap, InDesign

How do you get text to flow around the edges of an image?

Until today I hadn’t quite worked it out but, after a couple of hours of watching videos and searching through the online help, I’ve finally found a way of doing it in Adobe InDesign, the program that I use for designing my booklets and magazine articles.

I use the ‘Pen Tool’ to draw a box around the image but some of the settings that you need to make it work are hidden away in menus so, for my reference, and for anyone else searching on Google, I’m writing a series of step-by-step instructions (see link below).

The Pencil Tool

text wrap

Having worked out how that’s done, I’ve discovered an even easier method: using the ‘Pencil Tool’, you can draw around your image freehand using a mouse or a graphics tablet. InDesign converts this into a clipping path, which you can set to have the text flowing around it.

Link

text wrap web page

Wrap text around an image in Adobe InDesign a step-by-step guide.