Sandal Castle

It’s good to see the display boards are now in place at Sandal Castle, including my illustrations on this panel on the bailey which overlooks the barbican, drum towers and keep. I like the contrasting styles by the five artists who have each illustrated a panel. In my photograph you can just make out Liz Kay’s board – a bird’s-eye view of the castle in its heyday – which has been set up on the viewing platform on top of the keep.

We called at Sandal this morning to see the panels and, for once, there wasn’t a stiff breeze blowing up over the ramparts! A dunnock was singing its rather rushed, jingly song from a fence post as we walked across the bridge to the bailey.

  • My ‘Sandal Castle Guide’
  • Yes, there’s a Robin Hood connection with Sandal, this booklet features a walk around the castle.
  • You can still see damage from the Civil War siege.
  • The castle had its own kitchen and bakehouse.
  • A team of oxen and horse yoked together were used during the construction of the castle.
  • The well-preserved sally port was blocked long ago.
  • We have accounts of exactly what foods were stored in the castle’s larder.
  • Remnants of the great hall.
  • A garderobe: a medieval privy.
  • Oinment jars.
  • Civil war defences.
  • The Castle today.
  • Aerial view
  • The barbican.
  • gardrobe
    Privy shaft.
  • Castle folk.

Drawn to Life

line drawing

Our coffee table, which always has a pile of magazines and books on it. I’m currently reading through Walt Stanchfield’s Drawn to Life, but this drawing is another in the Digital Outlining tutorial by Eridey which I’m following, thinking about how using a thicker line might draw attention to the subject of a comic strip frame. Eridey features a similar comic strip frame as an example in the tutorial, so I’ve done my own version, to try out the technique for myself.

According to John Ruskin in The Elements of Drawing, any variation in line is to be frowned upon – in his opinion it doesn’t add anything to the drawing itself – but animator Walt Stanchfield’s approach is that anything that helps a drawing tell a story is a good thing.

Digital Outlining

line drawing tutorial

I love going through tutorials and as this one, a Clip Studio Paint tutorial, Tips for Digital Outling by Eridey, is especially appealing as it is more about drawing than technical details. My spheres have turned out wobbly and I know there’s a way around that, but that isn’t the point of the tutorial, it’s just the line drawing that we’re interested in here:

“The outline is a fundamental part of the illustration, sometimes it can be frustrating, especially when we see that our sketch looks better than the final version.”

Eridey

Yes, that’s a familiar feeling.

Link

Tips for Digital Outlining Clip Studio Paint tutorial by Eridey

Frogs

For three weekends running we had named storms sweeping in over Britain, causing widespread flooding, including here in the Calder Valley, so the weekend before last, when it turned calmer and milder, we started thinking when would the frogs reappear in the pond. Right on cue, later in the day we spotted a few males, waiting for the females to arrive.

frog

By the end of the week there were about twenty clumps of frogspawn in the sunnier, shallower corner of the pond which is always the favourite with them.

They’d finished for this year by the 12th March, when I took this photograph. Down at the bottom left corner of the clumps, a male smooth newt was performing his tail-wafting dance for the female. The mating season for newts goes on for weeks.

Sketchbooks, Local Guides and Walk Books

I’ve been compiling a list of my publications over the last 25 years. I didn’t realise that I’d been so productive.

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Having brought all those together, I’ve added four books that I wrote and illustrated between 1979 and 1998: A Sketchbook of the Natural History of the Country Round Wakefield, Richard Bell’s Britain, Deep in the Wood and Village Walks in West Yorkshire. All my other publications were as illustrator only or, on two occasions, as writer only.

Published
Categorized as Books

Farm Shop Cafe

Farm Shop Cafe
cafe sketches

Every character who walked into the Farm Shop Cafe made me think that I’d like to try animating them. I’m currently reading Walt Stanchfield’s Drawn to Life, based on a long-running series of drawing classes that he arranged for Disney animators, inbetweeners and clean-up artists. My aim here was to try to catch gestures, which Stanchfield describes as mini-stories. His method is rather like the way that I attempt to draw people walking by: getting an instant impression of the whole pose and character. I think of it as taking a mental photograph, a test of memory, but Stanchfield wants us to develop the storytelling elements suggested in the pose, costume and character in that instant.

Having tried animating in Clip Studio Paint EX on my iPad Pro, I now feel much more at home using it for the much simpler process of designing a comic strip. Putting my random sketches into the frames of a Clip Studio comic strip immediately gets me thinking what could the story be here, even though I know these four people had no connection with each other. I added each pose to the frames at random, just to fill the grid that I was drawing as I went along.

The only conscious connection that I imposed was adding the bearded man to fill the left-hand side of the letterbox frame. That implied a conversation with the coffee-drinking man already occupying the right-hand side of the frame. I turned the eyes of the characters towards each other but resisted the urge to add word balloons, I’ll experiment with that in another sketchbook comic strip.

Note that, on Stanchfield’s advice, I’ve at last gone back to my sketchbook. This one is A5 portrait format; my pocket sized A6 sketchbook isn’t big enough for quick random sketches. I’d soon find myself running off the edge of the page.

Collop Monday

“Collop Monday: pancake Tuesday: fruttis Wednesday, an hey for Thursday afternooin.”

‘Provincial Words in use at Wakefield’, collected by William Stott Banks, 1865.

‘COLLOP MONDAY, day before Shrove Tuesday.’, wrote W. S. Banks in 1865, ‘Children had a custom, and in some places have yet, of giving their School teacher bacon collops and eggs on this day. People thought no luck would attend them all the year if they did not dine on bacon collops this day.’

Published
Categorized as Drawing

Hand Drawn

There are thirty-four individual drawings of hands and almost as many of the figure in this short animation, which lasts about four seconds.

animation frames

It started off as a doodle of a man turning his head but moved further away from the cartoon original as I tried to get some expression into his face.

hand drawn cartoon

I drew it on my iPad Pro using an Apple Pencil in Clip Studio Paint EX. I’d been reading a tutorial about using Vector brushes so I’ve kept things simple and this has been drawn with the G-pen vector brush and the colour added on a separate layer using the Paint Bucket tool set to ‘Refer other layers’. As you can see here, the layers are treated as individual timelines in this program.

It’s usual to keep the timeline open for reference below the drawing but I might try my next animation with it above the drawing, because occasionally my hand would rest on a frame of the timeline and I’d find myself drawing on another cel.

I’ve got ‘Onion skinning’ turned on here. The blue outline represents the previous frame, the green the next frame.

Drawing all those individual frames of hands and faces has helped me get a feeling for the way the program works. It’s a time-consuming process but the traditional method of drawing every frame in an animation is closer to my sketchbook drawings than the previous methods that I’ve tried – such as Adobe Character Animator – which are often best approached as you would a cut-out animation.

Link

Clip Studio Paint EX

Published
Categorized as Drawing

Baker’s Dozen

After completing the animations based on my Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle, I’ve now turned to my 2011 paperback Wakefield Words based on Wakefield solicitor William Stott Banks’ 1865 collection of ‘Provincial Words in use at Wakefield. When I was working on the book, I enjoyed drawing the variety of subjects that he’d included. The pen and ink format is ideal for exploring various animation techniques that I want to try.

I’m surprised in this one that Banks records ‘toathre’ as meaning ‘two or three: a few’ as I would have thought it would have had the same meaning as ‘t’other’, meaning simply an alternative: ‘one or the other’.

Strider

With apologies for putting this snippet on a continuous loop, but it would be too short otherwise . . .

Please press pause before it drives you mad!

I’ve come back to an old favourite drawing program, Clip Studio Paint, which, in the EX, version can be used for animation on an iPad. It’s not as simple to use as the FlipaClip program that I experimented with the other day, but it offers far more possibilities when it comes to drawing, not that you’d realise that from this loop animation, which I’ve drawn simply to go through the stages of the process.

The thing that had me mystified was the relationship between frames, layers, folders and animation folders. If you can grasp that you can just get on with the drawing and track your progress in the animation instantly with the click of a button. It isn’t as difficult as it sounds, it’s just that it’s SO OBVIOUS that most YouTube tutorials don’t explain it clearly enough. Fighnimates‘ How to Animate in Clip Studio! (see link below) was the tutorial that finally enabled me to grasp the principle of using animation folders in the timeline.

animation layers
Animation Folder layers in Clip Studio Paint

The point about grasping the way layers work in the timeline is that I can have my background in one layer and my walking man in a separate layer above that. Getting the man to move for two seconds involved 24 separate drawings. Once I’d got the hang of all that, I realised that I could draw the man’s shadow on a separate layer below the man but above the background. Doing it that way, I didn’t have to worry about accidentally drawing over the silhouette of the man as I drew in the shadows. Of course the shadows also needed to be 24 separate drawings.

I believe that there is now an option to add a soundtrack in Clip Studio Paint, but in this case I stuck to the method that I’m familiar with and added it later when I’d exported the MP4 movie to Adobe Premiere Pro on my desktop iMac. The pair of trainers used to supply the sound effects for the bouncing ball and for the footsteps of camels crossing the Gobi Desert, once again came in for the man’s footsteps.

And I’m sure that my friend Karen Chalmers, who composed and performed the soundtrack for my Brief History of Rhubarb animation, would like me to make it clear that I’m the one who is responsible for the short solo performance on ocarina.

Link

How to Animate in Clip Studio Paint! twenty minute video tutorial by Fighnimates