Digital Colouring

Digital colouring

I like the printed look that you get using flat colours so I’ve been going through a tutorial on digital colouring. It should work well in my printed publications.

You scan your pen and ink drawing in black and white drawing at 600 dpi, using the ‘text’ setting. This is to avoid the slightly fuzzy ‘anti-aliased’ edges you’d get using the regular 300 dpi colour or grayscale settings. In Adobe Photoshop you can then go to the Channels palette (above) and press that first button at the bottom of the palette ‘Load Channel as Selection’.

Invert the selection and, on a new layer and fill with the foreground colour. For a comic strip you’d fill with pure black but here I’ve filled with brown.

Lock this line art layer you’ve created add the flat colours on separate layers, with shading, as on the wall in my top illustration, on another layer.

grayscale version of the illustrations

I tried the ‘Load Channel as Selection’ with my finished colour version then, after inverting it as before, filled it with black, producing this grayscale version.

Palladian Bridge

Palladian bridge
Palladian Bridge, Wentworth Castle
fallow deer
Palladian bridge

A fallow stag bellows to bring his group of hinds together and soon sees off a young buck that is hanging around at the edge of the herd.

The red deer hinds have gathered in the lower corner of the park and some wander out of the wood as we approach. A group of 10 or 15 mallards have gathered under the oaks, probably browsing for acorns. Squirrels are busy, but they seem to be going for sweet chestnuts. Sadly, Sudden Oak Death has infected some trees up by Stainborough Castle and that area is currently being cleared prior to replanting.

We’re told that the resident red deer stag is called Bertie. If he’s the one with the hinds, he’s lost his antlers. He’s the one in the background in my photograph, on the far right.

red deer
View of High Hoyland from Hilary's cafe, Cawthorne.
View looking towards High Hoyland from Hilary’s cafe, Cawthorne.

Gatepost

gatepost

To give the gatepost a black and white treatment, I marked the shapes of the shadows – the spot blacks as they’re called in comics – with an ‘x’, then filled in with a Pentel Brush Pen. Drawn using a Lamy nexx with a bold nib.

Hilary’s

Hilary's, Cawthorne

Looking at Hilary’s cafe from the garden you can guess which was the original cottage and in what order the adjacent cottage, lean-to extensions and extensions of extensions were added.

Autumn Fungi

Fungi at Harlow Carr this morning included common puffball and a large bracket growing on beech.

Lunchtime sketches.

Haversack

haversack

After my practice at cross-hatching using a dip pen on a tilted drawing board, I looked around for an object to draw and went for this Lowe Alpine haversack.

the boathouse, Newmillerdam

The wind has just changed from mild, from the mid-Atlantic, to cold from the north-east, so I sat with a latte to warm me up as I started this drawing at the Boathouse Cafe at Newmillerdam this morning. I used my Lamy nexx fountain pen but I think, now I’ve scanned them both in ‘text’ mode, pure black and white, that it would be hard to spot the difference between this and the dip pen in the haversack drawing.

The black areas were brushed in later from a photograph I’d taken on my phone, outlined with a Rotring Tikky Graphic pigmented ink pen and filled with a number 10 Prolene series 101 synthetic brush using the Rohrer’s india ink which I used with the dip pen.

Drawing Board

drawing board

In Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, Jessica Abel and Matt Madden recommend drawing with your board angled at approximately 60 degrees. My old cast iron letterpress gives me just the right angle to prop the board against, which I’m resting on my knees. My parallel motion drafting board can’t be manoeuvred to that angle.

cross hatching

They also recommend always drawing with arm movements when you’re working in pen, so definitely not my the finger movements that I always go for in my detailed work. I’m going to try some of the exercises they suggest for getting used to working with a dip pen.

drawing at the drawing board

It’s going to take a lot of getting used to but I like the feeling of making marks on what feels to me like a near-vertical surface. Bristol board, also recommended in Abel & Madden’s book, doesn’t tear as I scratch away with my dip pen and it gives a crisp line with no bleeding into the fibres of the paper surface.

writing on the drawing board

Link

Drawing Words & Writing Pictures website

Acorns

acorns

Last year was an exceptional one for acorns, at the top end of the wood in places it was like walking on a gravel path. This year it looks as if they’ll be in short supply. That shouldn’t be much of a problem for the grey squirrels at Nostell, who are making the most of what appears to be a good crop of sweet chestnuts this year.

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.