Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
The rain’s lashing against my studio window and it isn’t looking promising for New Year’s Day but I’ve finished my old A6 sketchbook and I’m ready to start a new A5 landscape Pink Pig sketchbook tomorrow. Whatever the weather throws at us.
No, my brother Bill didn’t actually appear in this year’s production of ‘A Christmas Carol’ at the Old Vic, but he did play Scrooge in our ambitious multi-media version in 1966. I played Marley’s ghost.
It’s been so long since I tried anything in acrylics but after watching Wendy Barratt’s Sky Artist of the Year masterclass on painting a portrait with a limited palette, I thought that I’d try it. This is Thomas Gissing, pharmacist and botanist, who makes an appearance in one of my forthcoming Dalesman articles.
It’s so different to my regular pen and watercolours approach and I realise that I need to be better organised to bring it together but I will give it another try, perhaps with a simpler subject, such as the box and sphere still life that Tai Shan Shierenberg painted earlier in the series.
As I draw the hyacinth, there’s a scent that reminds me of bluebell woods, a reminder that in a week’s time the days will be starting to get longer so spring isn’t too far away.
A young heron looking suitably bedraggled in the rain in Regent’s Park last month.
We’re on to planning our animation project on my Procreate Dreams animation course.
For the purposes of this project we need to keep the character design as simple as possible. It may be just 10 to 15 seconds of animation but at 24 frames per second that will potentially involve hundreds, even thousands of drawings.
My favourite gardening gloves are worn through at the fingers, so a good subject for another textures drawing for my Procreate Dreams course.
The various texture brushes will have their uses but I like to be in control so my favourite way of creating a texture is to hand draw it, in this case with Procreate’s Dry Ink brush.
Three stages of a drawing in Procreate experimenting with different ways of showing textures in an iPad drawing. This is a practical exercise from Brooke Eggleston’s Procreate Dreams animation course on Domestika. For this exercise we went back to the original version of Procreate which has a wider range of drawing tools.
At first I stuck with the virtual 6B Pencil, which felt close to my regular fountain pen sketchbook drawings.
As an illustrator I like to keep things clearly defined, so that the final printed version stays sharp, so stage 2, where I start creating tone by smudging with a virtual Damp Brush, isn’t my usual approach.
The nearest to that in my sketchbooks is when I’m using soluble ink in a fountain pen and I brush over with a drop of water to create a pen and wash effect.
In the final stage I used some of the preset texture brushes such as Twisted Tree, Heavy Metal and Rusted Decay from Procreate’s folder of Industrial brushes. I tried to find equivalents for the cross section of soil, roots and moss in the jar and for the sprouting hyacinth leaves.
There are various sparkle brushes available in Procreate but I felt the best way to get the effect of highlights in the glass was to knock back everything but the highlights by brushing in tone, in this case with a Short Hair brush from a Procreate course I took a couple of years ago.
This was intended to be an observational drawing but I could imagine some of those texture brushes being useful if you were trying to evoke a particular style: such as a 19th-century engraving.
I’d come back to this exercise again.
On a practical note, I tried replacing the PenTips tip of my Apple Pencil, which I’ve been using for at least a year, perhaps even two. That and cleaning the PenTips magnetic clip-on textured screen protector with my glasses spray and a microfibre cloth seemed to give me better control – more of a feel of drawing on paper.