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CarToons in ArtPen

Richard Bell’s Wild West Yorkshire nature diary Sunday, 17th August 2008

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MORE EXPERIMENTS in cartooning with my Rotring ArtPen with the 1.1 calligraphy nib, this time coloured on the computer, using the ‘Darken’ setting on the brush tool in PagePlus X2 (the process is exactly the same in Photoshop).

Trying to think of more subjects that I know well enough to draw from a ‘mind’s-eye view’, I sketch our present car, the Wagon R and a fondly remembered family car from my childhood, the Standard Vanguard Estate. Between them, a neighbour’s dog but I’m not familiar enough with dachshunds to capture its character in a cartoon.

Mini-beasts in the Meadow

In Rough Patch, my published ‘sketchbook from the wilder side of the garden’, there’s a spread where I imagine the mini-beasts I disturb as I’m moving a pile of bricks as characters in a 1940s animated film. Coming back to the theme, here are a woodlouse and toad that I disturbed while cutting the small meadow area this week and one of the house-flies that we’ve seen a lot of recently during warm, still periods during this month, in which we’ve had four times more rain than we’d normally have in August.

Nice weather for slugs; I came across dozens of a large brownish variety amongst the dripping grasses.