Tag: pencils

Text and Pencils

Clip Studio Paint on iPad Pro
Drawing in Clip Studio Paint on my iPad Pro.

I’ve been wanting to write one of my Dalesman Wild Yorkshire nature diaries about Bilberry Wood for a while. I’ve taken plenty of photographs of the trees, mosses, ferns and wild flowers and read up about the history of woodland in the Dales but I’ve struggled not to make my regular style of article sound like a botanical survey. Which it is, I guess.

Pencil rough drawn in Clip Studio Paint on my iPad Pro
Pencil rough drawn in Clip Studio Paint on my iPad Pro.

As an experiment, I’m trying a comic format, putting myself into the picture instead to get over a sense of how much fun it is to yomp through a sometimes rather boggy Dales wood, instead of going for the detached all seeing, all knowing narrator that I’d normally aim to pass myself off as in a magazine article.

rough of page
Starting inking and dividing the page into frames.

The Pheasants are Revolting

IF YOU START working out your ideas for a comic strip with thumbnails (quick pencil roughs) you can check that all the elements of the story – words, pictures, the way they break up into panels – fit together coherently before committing yourself to anything approaching final artwork.

This exercise from Drawing Words & Writing Pictures  calls for you to create your own characters, perhaps taking inspiration from staple characters of long-running comic strips such as a married couple, a group of children or talking animals.

I looked out of the window for inspiration but Biscuit the Welsh pony in the meadow wouldn’t work because he’s always on his own. Barbara suggested that the characters with most comic potential in our garden are the pheasants. Her favourite is the female who stands under the bird table pecking fallen sunflower hearts from the edge of the patio, as if she’s sitting at a desk.

The male struts about pompously, so you assume that he’s always heading for an undignified fall.

With my first quick draft I realised that I didn’t need the ‘desk’; amusing as it is, it plays no part in the story. To present the dialogue in the correct order I needed to move the female to the right.