Where no spaniel has gone before . . .
Happy birthday Henry.
Spaniels in Space
Tag: comic strip
Winter Sketches Comic
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 . . .
Chaucer & Co
I spent the morning researching connections to Chaucer, Ruskin and Darwin for my Bilberry Wood comic strip but it’s not a thesis, it’s a double-page spread comic, so I’ve roughed out some ideas to work out how I’m going to fit it all in.
Comics made ridiculously simple
The title of this self-explanatory experiment is a tribute to Miles Kington’s Nature Made Ridculously Simple, which might be due for a reprint.
Beyond Gamma Cygni
Before I consign my 1971 student notebook back to the attic, I couldn’t resist showing you this. I don’t remember drawing it but it seems to be nothing more than a doodle that got elaborated when I should have been working on my thesis. The space suits are from 2001: A Space Odyssey and from the Frank Hampson era of Dan Dare. The astro-physicist bears a slight resemblance to Hermann Bondi.
Had I drawn the Gamma Cygni Outpost as a more elongated asteroid, I could have claimed to have predicted the interstellar object Oumuamua, which passed through our solar system in 2017. I don’t know where the name Salodrin came from. I’m sure it’s not from any science-fiction story that I’d been reading.
Sadly, this is as far as the mission got, so the ‘beyond’ in the title is misleading. So often when I look back at the ideas that I worked on just for fun, I think, why didn’t I take this further?
Light pad
Last week I was struggling to use my perspex drawing board as a lightbox in the bright sunlight even with the studio blind down and I had to resort to tracing from my rough to watercolour paper on the back bedroom window. This Huion A4 LED light pad, delivered today, is a great improvement.
Working in the confines of a single panel I find that I tend to squeeze my figures in. When I look at them I feel that the proportion isn’t quite right. They look like figures trying to squeeze into a lift but with such a cropped view it’s difficult to see what’s going wrong.
With the light pad I can transfer from a problem figure on the watercolour paper to a sheet of layout paper then work out the pose including the parts of the figure that fall outside the boundary of the frame.
The layout paper then goes under the watercolour paper and I can pencil in, then ink in, the improved version of the figure.
Link; Huion LED light pad
Soap Bubbles
The confrontation between Charles Waterton and Edward Thornhill Simpson the soap manufacturer is rather wordy. It wasn’t until I printed a paper copy at the final size that I could see that the font was larger than it needed to be.
In this frame I’ve dropped a scan my pen and watercolour into a layout that I’ve set up in the comic strip creation program Manga Studio EX5.
Although in this second version the type looks rather small on screen, it is still a bit larger than is necessary to make it legible in print but it’s small enough to give a bit of breathing space around the speech bubbles.
Waterton in Watercolour
I saved the first image in RGB (red, green, blue) format, the recommended method for viewing on screen, the second in CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) which supposedly gives the best results when printing but I prefer the colour cast of RGB, even on the printed version from my colour laser. Neither version manages to capture the transparency of the original watercolour artwork. A professional printer will, I’m sure, make a better job of it.
The typeface is Hannotate SC Regular, set in a italics in the second version. I might hand letter the final version but for the moment this is a useful way of setting up the design of each frame of the comic strip. There might be a few tweaks to script and it will be easier to accommodate those if I don’t commit to hand written text at this stage.
Different Planet
I’M BACK exploring the final frontier; comic strips. Here’s the next panel in the little story that I’m illustrating as part of the Drawing Words & Writing Pictures course.
My first attempt had the astronaut planting the flag but for him to do this with his right hand was awkward, if I wanted to keep the left to right action that runs through a western comic strip (it goes the opposite way in Japanese Manga comics).
Hopefully the implication is that he has just planted it himself, rather than discovered an existing flag on the moon he’s just landed on.
It’s tricky explaining a sequence of events in just one panel, but I can now move on to the end of the story. These last two panels show his return being greeted with much fanfare and his realisation that he’s landed on the wrong planet.
Sat-nav
The next part of the exercise is to add some extra panels and gags. The first thing that occurred to me was to cover the abrupt jump from moon to alien planet so here’s the lunar module heading back on its return journey.
How does the astronaut become lost in space? It’s got to be his sat-nav that’s faulty. Uttoxeter was the first town to mind when I thought of sat-nav, so Utopia sounded like a suitable name for an alien planet. Taunton and Titan might just work or Mars and Marsden . . .
No, it could only be Uttoxeter. That ‘x’ in the middle makes it sound suitably alien. Or wrong.
Just to tie things up I include a frame to show touch-down on the wrong planet.
Here’s the new, extended sequence;
Seeing all eight panels together really gives the impression that this is some kind of a story.
So my truncated new story could start with the sat-nav problem and end with meeting the aliens. Not very funny but at least it has a beginning a middle and an end. I have much to learn.
Blast Off!
‘WE HAVE ignition!’ . . .
I’ve been eager to get back to my Drawing Words & Writing Pictures tutorials but other commitments intervened however here I am with a – shh!, don’t tell anybody – free weekend so I’m resuming with the chapter 3 tutorial The wrong planet, an activity devised by Pahl Hluchan.
I’m starting by illustrating their suggested five panel story. Each panel is drawn on a 3 x 3 inch square of cartridge paper to which I’ll add extra panels to pad out the action and extra gags if I can think of any, then subtract panels to see how few panels my extended story can be whittled down to.
Post-it Panels
A three inch square of cartridge is a fiddly piece of paper to draw on; the tutorial recommends using post-it notes which sounds a better idea as they’d stay put as you work on them, but I hadn’t got any, so I’ve cut down some 120 gsm Canson cartridge which is a pleasanter surface to work on than the scrap paper that I usually grab for tutorials.
The panels need to be separate for the editing process. This is intended to be a group exercise where you’d mix and match each other’s artwork, sticking the post-it notes on the wall, but I’m going for the one-man version, for the kind of student that the authors refer to as a Ronin, a Ronin being, as I mentioned back in the summer, a freelance samurai who wandered around feudal Japan, or, in my case, a wilfully reclusive freelance illustrator enjoying being holed up in his studio for the weekend (shortly after I wrote that Barbara and I had to pop out with an urgent book order!).
Lamy Safari
I’m using my Lamy Safari fountain pen which is my current favourite for writing and for relaxed drawing. I’ve been inking in the blacks with a Pentel Brush Pen.
The Safari is filled with a Lamy ink cartridge. I haven’t tried it with waterproof Noodler’s ink.
Link; Drawing Words & Writing Pictures by Jessica Abel and Matt Madden