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.
A mapping pen, as the name suggests, is designed to produce regular lines and the Clip Studio Paint version does a good job of emulating that, but without the danger of twisting and splaying its long, flexible nib, something I had to be careful to avoid when I used the real thing in my student days. I soon discovered that a dip pen with a Gillot 303 or 1950 nib was a better option for me.
The Clip Studio mapping pen tool gives a more consistent line than the G-pen which I’ve mainly used so far. The G-pen is designed to give the kind of varied, expressive line that is such of feature of comic strip art.
For once, as a change from drawing my hand, the subject I often revert to when I’m sitting in a waiting room, I drew my feet instead, resting on the arm of the sofa.
I wouldn’t try that in the waiting room.
Drawn in Clip Studio Paint with an Apple Pencil on an iPad Pro, using the Mapping Pen tool and a Size 13 Transparent Watercolour Brush.
And having sorted out a pen that I like, here’s a final sketch in colour.
I tried all the watercolour brushes available in Clip Studio Paint and decided that ‘Transparent’ was the nearest to the watercolour washes I use in my sketchbooks.
Perspective can be a bit of a struggle but, according to Italian comic artist Pietro B. Zemelo in a recent Clip Studio Paint webinar, ‘you can’t go wrong’ with the perspective ruler. I have gone wrong actually as I didn’t plot my vanishing points in quite the right place when trying it out on my iPad, but it’s a lot of fun to use.
I wonder if I could draw a set of steps . . .
Links
Tips for Constructing Comic Pages with Clip Studio Paint webinar on YouTube. He also explains the mysteries of the ‘Lock transparent pixels’ button – something that I’ve never dared mess with – and explains the difference between the ‘Divide frame border’ and ‘Divide frame folder’ tools.
I love the printmaking effect that I can get by converting one of my sketches into a vector graphic in Adobe Illustrator CC 2018. I’ve reproduced this image at almost its full screen size (the original sketch is much smaller) because I didn’t want to soften it by reducing it too much.
I’ve downloaded the program this morning as part of my year’s subscription to Adobe’s Creative Cloud and I’ve been going through the beginner’s tutorials as it’s so many years since I last used Illustrator.
I’d never come across the option to automatically trace a scan or a photograph of a drawing and turn it into crisp black and white vector artwork. I immediately started thinking of how I might use that in my work.
George-a-Green, the Jolly Pinder of Wakefield, before and after vectorisation.
For instance, I’m currently working on a historical article for the Dalesman magazine and I feel that vector graphics could give the effect of a woodcut. Even after a lot of practice, I’m more used to drawing with a pen than an Apple Pencil, so this might be an effective way of combining the freedom of drawing with the graphics effects available on the computer.
In both of the examples above I went for the ‘Shades of Grey’ preset in the Trace Image dialogue.
I’m learning to use Photoshop CC 2018 so I’ve been trying out a tutorial to redesign the Cover Photo for my Facebook page, so that the Profile Picture is integrated into the design. The photograph of me looking windswept at Sandal Castle was so bright compared with my sketchbook pages that I toned it down with a sepia wash, another Photoshop technique I needed to practice.
I’ve set up a Wild Yorkshire Facebook Page, so if you’d like to see updates about this blog:
I haven’t turned on the hose pipe during this long dry spell but this weekend the pond had got so low that I felt I had to. The surface was entirely covered with duckweed, so I put on my arm-length waterproof gloves and pulled it out around the edges, then used a pond net to scoop up the remaining clumps in the middle.
A A Milne’s poem Bad Sir Brian Botany came to mind. The bit where Sir Brian gets his comeuppance from the villagers:
“Sir Brian went a journey, and he found a lot of duckweed . . . “
I left the piles of duckweed at the water’s edge to give the pond life a chance to find its way back and gave a helping hand to a few ramshorn snails, dragonfly larvae and black water beetles that I spotted struggling.
I didn’t see any frogs or newts but I was skimming the surface layers and they were probably lying low.
