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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
I’ve drawn our Ikea Ektorp sofa using the Milli Pen fineliner in Clip Studio Paint. I’m trying to improve my watercolour technique in the program, to make it resemble my regular sketchbooks, so this time I went for the Running Watercolour Brush. To take away the airbrushed smoothness that I’m trying to avoid, I added a texture on the final top layer, to give an impression of paper.
Even with those tweaks, I can’t recreate the organic line of this little Safari Fountain Pen drawing of cushions from a couple of weeks ago. The original is three inches (8 cm) across.
Barbara’s bag
This drawing of Barbara’s bag was in my A5 landscape sketchbook, so it’s about four inches square. I don’t have the skills to recreate the unpredictable nature of ink on paper in Clip Studio Paint, but I’ll certainly continue with it, if only to keep emphasising to myself what a pleasure it is to draw with real pen and ink.
I like a bit of challenge, so I’m composing my first movie score. It might be just a two-minute film of frost-covered plants in our back garden, but it’s taken me several hours at the keyboard and computer so far!
It was an article in the latest copy of iCreate magazine that got me started; they demonstrate how easy it is to drop your movie into Garageband, Apple’s music-creation software. I plugged in my midi-keyboard, set the film going and played the simplest of chords as carefully as I could.
Just how difficult can it be to compose a snippet of wintery background music?
You Know the Score
The curly-topped ‘7’ symbol represents a pause – musically a rest – of one crochet’s length. A crochet is a quarter note but the dot after it means that I paused for slightly longer.
You can watch the score appearing as you play, which is astonishing, but, as you’d expect with my shaky hands, it does end up looking rather messy, with my pauses there for all to see, marked with dots and squiggles. In the stave above, the hash mark reveals that I accidentally hit one of the black notes, F sharp (this is the lower, bass clef, normally played with the left hand).
On a Roll
This is where Garageband comes to the rescue: having mapped out a sketchy version of my idea on the keyboard, I can switch from the intimidatingly professional-looking Score view to what they call the Piano Roll. This gives a visual representation of the notes that I hit, which I’m much more at home with.
I can see where I’ve failed to hit all three notes of a chord simultaneously but it’s easy to click the offending note with a mouse and adjust its length, so that it’s perfectly synchronised. I don’t mind the playing being slightly ragged, but I definitely need to be more consistent in hitting the beat, which is indicated by the bolder vertical lines on the graph. I’ve got a lot of clicking and dragging to do to get this score into shape.
Back in Score view, can see that I’m clomping across from one bar to another, without any sense of the four-beats-to-a-bar rhythm that I’m supposedly playing in. I’m learning so much from the process.
