Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
A micro-hike around the arboretum and conifer plantations at Newmillerdam this morning. I got a surprise when I saw a tiny invertebrate trundling by as I focussed on algae on a tree trunk. I couldn’t see it at all with the naked eye but it no doubt ran for cover from the glaring light of the eight LEDs of my mobile microscope.
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.
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.
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.
More man-in-the street pen and tone figures, drawn in Clip Studio Paint on the iPad.
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.
I spotted this mobile microscope in a sale at the RSPB Shop at Fairburn Ings and decided to give it a try.
This sea mat colony on a crab shell was photographed at the lowest magnification, which ranges from 20-200x. With the unaided eye, I can see it only as a stipple. There’s part of a barnacle shell in the bottom left corner.
Hornwrack is another colonial animal, which looks like dried up seaweed when you find it on the strandline. This 20x view shows the individual cells that the bryozoan filter-feeding occupants lived in.
I’ve gone for Gothick with this Clip Studio Paint iPad drawing. 3D-drawing figure posed in Clip Studio (I’m getting the hang of how the joints work). I added flat tones in Clip Studio then used the Magic Wand tool, Fill and a gradient for the background.
Still grappling with primitive geometric shapes in Clip Studio Paint.
Between the wars, for a period of 12 years, you could have boarded a Bradford-bound train at St Pancras (not Euston, as I’d previously written in this post) and travelled through this railway cutting at Newmillerdam. The Midland Railway opened this line in 1905 and it closed in 1968.
I’m walking the full circuit of Newmillerdam Country Park, keeping to the paths nearest to the edges of the woods.
Snaking ironwork is a local feature, which I’ve seen on the footbridge to the island at Walton Hall and on a balustrade on the side staircase at the Bingley Arms at Horbury Bridge. If the wavy spikes on this gate at Newmillerdam were supposed to warn off poachers from raiding the Chevet Estate, it didn’t work.
In Clip Studio Paint, you can, as I have here, construct 3D objects from ‘primitives’ such as cubes, spheres and polygonal shapes or you can import ready-made objects such as the figure and the cart. I’ve followed these closely as reference, drawing in my normal pen and tone method on the iPad.
The advantage of constructing a setting like this is that I could then have the figure walk around to the other side of the scene for the next frame in a comic, or even show a bird’s-eye view.
We’re going for Maris Peer second earlies again this year but also trying some ‘ultra early’ Maris Bards. You have to buy them at this time of year as the popular varieties soon get picked over but we won’t be planting them until March or April, depending on the weather, so until then we’ll be chitting them: letting their shoots develop in a cool, light place (the back bedroom window sill).