Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Drawing indoors and in a rainswept car park: this morning’s rain meant that we didn’t get off to Newmillerdam. I was looking down on the cars at the same angle as I was looking down on the piles of books and CDs on the shelf under my brother-in-law’s coffee table, so they look like a couple of models.
The gallery of sketchbook pages that I posted the other day reminded me of a comic strip. Haven’t worked out the story yet but the chair reminds me of a Sherlock Holmes story . . .
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.
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’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.
I used an line/tone conversion on a photograph I’d taken at Newmillerdam for the background for these characters drawn for a Clip Studio Paint Tutorial.
I’ve tried to get a screen print effect with the colour on my sketch of the pointsettia.
I remember Letratone, which consisted of rub-down sheets of screen tone. It was rather expensive and you needed to be a neat worked to use it effectively, so I never used it. Here’s the Clip Studio Paint equivalent, designed to reproduce well in print rather than to be viewed on screen, which is why there’s a checkered pattern in the tones in this version.