Category: People

Pizza Noir

Rivers Meet Cafe, Methley
Rivers Meet Cafe, Methley
pizza sketch

I’m reading Shawn Martinbrough’s How to Draw Noir Comics so I’m on the look out for seedy characters and bleak urban settings on the mean streets of Methley and Birstall.

He suggests that you should take photographs of characters, cars and ‘still lives’ – plants, tables and chairs. Set the camera to black and white because that gets you looking for compositions in dark and light.

There were several diners in Pizza Express who would have made suitable characters but I didn’t have the nerve to ask them if they’d mind being photographed and opted for a discrete sketch instead.

Erik ten Hag
Football manager Erik ten Hag gets the noir treatment.

Villagers

villagers

In Framed Ink 2, Marcos Mateu-Mestre suggests that the shape of the frame in a comic can help tell the story. This Clip Studio Paint sketch is a rough idea for the scene from The Book of Were-Wolves where the traveller, Sabine Baring-Gould, arrives at a small village in search of a pony and trap and meets the local curate and the village mayor.

villagers

I’ve drawn them as full figure character sketches but for this scene it’s the reaction of Monsieur le Curé and M. le Maire to a mysterious traveller that we’re interested in so we could got into letterbox format and make the traveller more mysterious by only including part of the figure.

mayor and curate
Monsieur le Maire

When it comes to the discussion between M. le Curé and M. le Maire about how to deal with the traveller’s request I could go for a square head to head panel of just the two of them.

And when we meet Monsier le Maire for the first time he might merit a panel to himself, with a vertical format to show the full figure.

Himesh Patel

Himesh Patel

Himesh Patel plays Jeevan Chaudhary in the TV mini-series Station Eleven, adapted from Emily St John Mandel’s novel about a band of travelling players in a post-pandemic Great Lakes landscape.

Once again this is drawn in Clip Studio Paint on the iPad, using a standard drawing figure for the pose but this time instead of relying on my memory and imagination I took the details of the character and costume from a photograph in last week’s Radio Times.

Figures

figures

More figures and these first three are ready-made poses that you can use on the virtual 3D drawing figures in Clip Studio Paint. They were chosen at random and happened to line up like this on my row in this order entirely by chance, but looking at them, I find it impossible not to imagine that there’s some story going on.

The man on the right is actually one of a pair, he’s seizing someone by the shoulders and the other figure, not shown here, is being pulled back.

figures

The man on the right is loosely based on a bad guy in a movie we saw recently. For the figure on the left I decided that I’ve drawn enough jackets and that it was time to draw someone wearing a jumper, so I thought that I might as well add rolled down wellies and make him into a fisherman.

figures

By now I was running out of ideas for costumes, so these two are based on a couple of the students from my art foundation, way back in the late 1960s.

Figures

figures

I’m practising using the 3D drawing figure in Clip Studio Paint – a kind of virtual lay figure – keeping to the standard body shape but developing the character through its actions and costume. I’m going for a limited range of tones because it’s the form of the character that I’m interested in, but I look forward to adding colour, which I can do later on another layer, over the tonal layer but beneath the line drawing.

Sketches

chairs and people sketches

Recent sketches from my 125×90 mm Hahnemühle D&S sketchbook. Tones added in Photoshop.

Mario

Mario and my dad

For Remembrance Day I’ve looked out this slide of my dad, Robert Douglas Bell, meeting Mario, a policeman on duty at the entrance to the Vatican Museum in August 1963.

They got talking a discovered that they’d been on opposing sides at the Siege of Tobruk in 1941. The siege lasted 241 days, from 10 April to 27 November and was the longest in the history of the British Army.

Mario and Douglas
Mario and Robert Douglas Bell at the entrance to the Vatican Museum, August 1963

Mario remembered the big guns pounding away and I believe that he was taken prisoner. My dad never talked about his experience there but my cousins in Sheffield say that he was trapped behind enemy lines when he attempted to rescue a wounded comrade. The local Bedouin tribesmen helped him escape.

At the time he was in the Royal Engineers, along with his old friend Alf Deacon manning a Bofors anti-aircraft gun.

Mario and Robert Douglas Bell at the entrance to the Vatican Museum, August 1963
My mum, in the background with family friend and travelling companion Philippa, was the only one of us who actually stepped inside the Vatican Museum as she was determined to see the Sistine Chapel.

Booster Folk

waiting room sketch

“I thought you were writing us a cheque,” quipped the nurse at the Covid Vaccination Centre.

“We’re not allowed to take photographs – but it said nothing about sketching!”

As with my first two Covid vaccinations, I’ve had no bad reaction. Except that I’ve decided not to have a glass of red wine at the weekend for a couple of weeks. Tough.

car

And I remembered not to go for a glass of Sicilian Nero d’Avola at Pizza Express at lunch time. This is going to be a long two weeks.

Duck-feeders

man on park bench

I stuck to black and white at Newmillerdam this morning – a B-nib Lamy filled with De Atramentis ink and a Pentel brush pen.

When people are wearing bright yellow or blue, it’s tempting to add that as a flat wash but I’m experimenting with black and white for my werewolf comic, to create an inky gothic atmosphere.

Also as an experiment, I scanned these at 600 dpi (dots per inch) in ‘1 bit B/W’, reducing everything to either pure black or white.