Today I made a font out of my handwriting.
Here is a little cartoon with my regular scrawly handwriting direct on the cartoon.
And here it is with the new font.
Better?
Tag: experimenting
Exchange Christmas stockings
Here’s today’s Christmas card idea.
Nib and ink with the lightbox and coloured on the computer.
Penguin in a cloak
Update: You can now buy this cartoon on a t-shirt, hoodie, or sticker at RedBubble. How can you resist?
Here’s another drawing of a penguin in a cloak.
This one is interesting to me because of how I achieved it. First, I copied from a picture of a penguin I took at London zoo.
I sketched it in pencil and then sketched in the mask and cloak. Then I put it on the lightbox and drew the outline on a new sheet using a tria marker with the brush nib.
Then I scanned it and adjusted the levels to get the white paper white. I copied the layer and coloured it in, and put that coloured layer under the original scanned layer, using the Color Burn blending mode.
The nice thing for me is that I like this sort of look and I’m gradually working out how to achieve it. Gradually.
Screen printing penguin superhero
I’ve wanted to experiment with screen printing for a long time and today I finally did some. It was pretty mucky work, but good fun. I printed a design on to a t-shirt and on to a few cards.
Here’s my decapitated body to give you an idea of how the t-shirt came out.
I should have done another pass of the ink, but I didn’t realise at the time and once I’d picked up the screen to check that was the end of that.
The cards took the ink far more happily, of course, but I was guessing at location and they weren’t fixed down, so there was some smudging.
Key lessons I’ve learnt:
- do two passes on t-shirts
- to make postcards, stick down a few and work out where the screen should go before starting
- put newspaper down so you don’t have to be so careful about not getting ink on your table
- have a scrap cloth or something to hand so it’s easy to wipe ink off your hands if necessary
- for multiple t-shirts, you need to get them all ready first on bits of card or something, so you can work through them. There isn’t really time to do that once the ink is on the screen.
I did this just using some greaseproof paper cut out for the template. It worked pretty well, but I suspect most of the designs I want to do will be better with two colours and that will have to be far less haphazard.
Penguins prefer fish
And here’s a bonus entry for today with more penguins!
Sarah said penguins aren’t expressive. I beg to differ.
This one was sketched very roughly in bits, then I used the light box (:-)) to ink it, scanned it and coloured in the grey on the computer.
Tiger
I’ve been really trying to get my head around the nibs recently. I drew this tiger toy and coloured it in with Faber Castell Pitt pens.
Heads, hands, feet and penguins
Today I totally lacked inspiration for a cartoon, so I practiced heads, hands, feet and penguins. I started by reading Jack Cole’s instant cartooning course and drew these as a result.
The course recommends working on hands and feet a lot, so I tried drawing some hands. This is my hand.
And this is a sort of copy of my drawing of my hand, which isn’t so good and shows that it’s not drawn from life. But nice in pen.
Then I tried some feet.
Another foot from the front. Drawn with a Rotring B nib pen.
That’s enough of that! Let’s draw a cat!
Oh, ok, here’s my hand again.
Yes, that’s a little penguin next to it. A friend linked to a how to draw penguins course on the Guardian site. So I tried some…
We can do both at once, though, right?
