Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Barbara’s mum and her friend used to go into town on the access bus on a Friday morning and she’d often come back with a brush. This bannister brush from Wilko’s was a bit of a bargain at £1.49.
I drew the brush and my camera bag in Procreate on the iPad, using Procreate’s Technical Pen.
We’ve had this pelargonium for more than a year, so it’s not surprising that its now looking leggy undernourished, but the leaf-scarred stems make it more interesting to draw.
Drawn in Procreate with the ‘Technical Pen’, a plain no-nonsense virtual pen.
After a year, our zonal pelargonium is beginning to look a bit leggy.
Drawn in Procreate on the iPad using the Tinderbox virtual pen from the Inking section. Having got through all three of my PenTips 2 soft Apple Pencil tips, I’m now back to a plain Apple Pencil tip but the canvas texture of the PenTips Magnetic Matte Screenprotector is working well for me, an improvement on drawing on the iPad’s glass screen.
I struggled to identify this flower, photographed with my iPhone as we walked around Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust’s Idle Valley reserve a couple of weeks ago. I think what’s happened is that greater stitchwort flowers are growing up amongst the foliage of some kind of cranesbill.
It was drawn in Procreate on the iPad but if I’d been drawing from the actual plant in my sketchbook I might have realised that they’d got mixed up.
Unless you can suggest the identity of a plant with stitchwort-type flowers and cranesbill-style leaves?
I’ve been reading a list of ‘Five Essential Tips for Beginners’ in digital art and number one is: ‘Use a light touch when drawing on your tablet of device. This will help prevent unwanted pressure marks and smudging’.
That’s good advice. Having got through two PenTips 2 soft tips for my Apple Pencil in just a couple of weeks, I’m pleased that I’ve done better with the last remaining one.
I’m hoping that the lighter touch that I’m learning to use will transfer to my regular drawing with a pen on paper.
Another problem that I had with my way of drawing was that I was inadvertently changing the colour of my brush by resting a finger on the screen and invoking the eye-dropper tool. I’ve changed that in preferences so I can access the eye-dropper with a different shortcut.
More PenTips goodies: glove, grip and, my favourite, the PenPad Shortcut Panel for Procreate on the iPad. I’ve used Procreate a lot and gone through dozens of tutorials but there are some shortcuts, such as ‘Cut’, that I have a mental block about. There they all are on the pad, so I don’t have to break my workflow by searching through sub-menus.
I’m still searching for my favourite virtual pen in Procreate. In Clip Studio Paint my go-to pen is usually the ‘Real G-Pen’ but in Procreate with dozens of virtual pens to choose from, I’m still undecided.
Perhaps drawing my chitted potatoes with a selection of pens from the Procreate ‘Inking’ section will help me narrow it down.
The next step on my Procreate animal illustration course is to take one of my thumbnail sketches and try it with three different lighting set-ups. I’ve gone for the light coming from the left, the right and from below (as if the goose had been caught in the beam from car headlights).
The one I like best is the light from above left and slightly behind, with a glint of reflected light from the bottom right.
Then it’s on to a rough drawing, not too detailed, but indicating the different areas of plumage.
I’m picking up again on Román García Mora’s Naturalist Animal Illustration with Procreate course and here we’re asked to work towards our final illustration by trying out miniature sketches of different poses of our animal or bird.
From the nine I’ve now got to choose three for my final spread. I’m intending to go for a flying goose top left, a main illustration bottom right facing into the page and somewhere in between, a small sketch illustrating some kind of behaviour.
I showed this to John – who is still surviving in the hospice – and he liked the aggressive goose in the centre and the one shown feeding in the water.
I’m designing a logo for the Friends of our local library, and Arts and Crafts style Carnegie Free Library and I’m struggling to get the precision I need for a simple graphic that can be reproduced at various sizes, including on a letterhead.
I’ve been learning all I can about Procreate and it should be simple to design it in the program but, as so often, my shaky hands are letting me down. For some projects I would welcome the wobble as it gives can make an intimidating facade look more friendly – and this is for a ‘Friends’ group after all -but I’ve decided to go for a program that enables even me to easily produce precise geometric shapes and I’ve gone to Adobe Illustrator.
But I might come back to Procreate for the finishing touches.
This looks like an Andy Warhol-style famous-for-fifteen-minutes portrait of John Carr but the idea is to come up with a colour harmony that will suit the Carr Tricentenary exhibit in the Redbox Gallery in Horbury.
Procreate includes a Colour Harmony Wheel so starting off with the colour of Yorkshire stone – the coal measures sandstone of St Peter’s Church – I’ve experimented with the various options available. Complementary does give me enough colours, Tetradic gives too many fighting against each other, so it’s the Split Complementary, Analogous and Triadic that are most likely to give me a workable colour scheme.