Category: People

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.

Peasants from Flagey

peasants, after Courbet

For my werewolves project I need one or two French peasants who claim to have encountered a loup garou, so I’ve taken a look at Courbet’s Peasants from Flagey.

For the werewolf itself, I thought that the lean look of this wolf sculpture from Chatsworth might be the way to go.

Duck Feeders

sketches of people
colour swatches
sketches of people feeding ducks

There isn’t time to add colour when drawing passers-by and when I start writing notes it soon gets a bit complicated. ‘B’, for instance, could stand for blue, black or brown.

I’ve used the colour printer’s CMYK – cyan, magenta, yellow and ‘key’ colour, which is usually black.

A capital letter indicates a strong or darker colour, lower case a paler version, so my ‘gB’ is supposed to indicate blue with a touch of green in it.

I’ve drawn ducks, pond life, trees and flowers at Newmillerdam, so I thought that it was about time that I turned my attention to the people visiting the country park.

These guys weren’t actually feeding the ducks, just taking a break on a bench by the war memorial.

Addingford Steps: green spaces

Dalesman

My Addingford show in the Redbox Gallery in Horbury comes to an end later this month but I’m following up its theme of the importance to us all of having a ‘local patch’ in my November ‘Wild Yorkshire’ column in The Dalesman.

Rather than it being just me saying how much I value this stretch of the Calder Valley, I thought I should quote one of the many studies that suggest that being in nature can benefit our physical and mental health. This study from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA was made before the pandemic, but seems even more relevant now:

 Green space can provide mental health benefits and possibly lower risk of psychiatric disorders. This nation-wide study covering >900,000 people shows that children who grew up with the lowest levels of green space had up to 55% higher risk of developing a psychiatric disorder independent from effects of other known risk factors. 

Residential green space in childhood is associated with lower risk of psychiatric disorders from adolescence into adulthood, PNAS, 2019