Balancing Values in Black & White Line Art

In the seven months since beginning my Low Residency MFA in Illustration at Hartford, the biggest personal change I've witnessed beyond multiplied creative output is a new found sense of focus and confidence in my individual style. In the 6 years from undergraduate work til now, a number of techniques, media, and approaches took hold of me. In that experimentation, I lost a sense of confident direction in my work... and my output suffered as well. Whether it was the final decision to take responsibility for my growth through graduate work, or simply being surrounded by massively talented classmates, almost instantly in the first days on campus I could see with a new clarity which piece best represented me as an artist. 

'Survival of the Biggest' had been an experiment in process, using technical pen on blank white clayboard as opposed to scratching into pre-inked black scratchboard (something I went back and forth about multiple times over the years). Claybord's unique flexibility for sculpting values in ink combined with additional compositional prep work on my part brought the piece to a certain level of style and finish that I continue to be proud of today.  I decided that between my enjoyment of that process and satisfaction with the final product, this was the vein I would continue down for the foreseeable future. 


Since that moment seven months ago, I have held true to the process and started building a new portfolio of work that feels genuinely 'Albright,' for all intents and purposes. Now I've come to a point where I feel a comfortable enough distance from the pieces that I can evaluate the body of work as a whole, and am more able to improve upon the formula in small but significant ways. For example, using what I'd call thumbnail evaluation some images are more effective than others when viewed from a distance or reduced to a small preview on screen.  Viewing an image at this greatly reduced size helps you ignore the subtleties for a moment and instead judge the overall composition, clarity, and impact.  

Using quick thumbnail evaluation, I've recognized that my drawings with larger areas of heavy blacks are more immediately effective and easier for the eyes to process than drawings with even contrast through the entire piece.  Case in point, both 'Sabre Skull Valley' and 'Pterodactdinner' (above) are rather tonally even throughout.  Intending to provide the viewers dense jungle of information to explore, all areas of the picture plane are handled with equal contrast and no large areas of heavy black aside from 'Pterodactdinner's frame. But in comparison with 'Lava' or 'Post-Apocrowlyptic' (below), both of which contain large areas of black to counter evenly balanced hatch work, I'm finding the two latter examples are more successful and give the eyes both a resting place and an easier point of entry.  And by that virtue, they both perhaps appear more 'finished.'

Long story short, moving forward I intend to pay closer attention to having areas of heavy black as a resting point for the eyes.  I also suspect this will lead me to make more complete use of the claybord medium in the sense that these black areas will require that I use my scratch tool for white detailing, rather than building up values with the pen and using the scraper tool for corrections alone.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more!

Kablam! - mixed media Soda Gallery piece

This is a piece I just finished for the upcoming Fab 50 Show at The Soda Gallery in Dallas on March 1st (50 artists, 50 pieces, $50 each).

This was my first attempt at adding color to a scratchboard, and found that it's remarkably easy to to add watercolor washes to the Ampersand Claybords.  The silver was also an experiment, where I masked out the black drawing with a carefully cut chunk of blue painter's tape.  Spray painting the black was a total disaster, actually, because the paint wouldn't adhere over the silver layer.  I ended up having to manually draw the lines and hand paint the fills.  The painter's tape did a nice job of texturizing the silver when I pulled it off, which was a happy accident.  


Despite my reluctance to integrate color into my drawings, generally, this was successful enough that I suspect I'll be doing more of it down the line.

Sinking Mastodon Illustration & T-Shirt Design

I did this illustration towards the end of the summer and never got around to posting it.  Inspired by the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, I wanted to do a piece illustrating the murky decline of a mastodon.  It's a bit more graphic than my usual work in the sense that there's no detailed background, instead letting the black literally swallow the image down.  

I ended up adapting the drawing into a T-Shirt mockup for one of my favorite metal bands.  We never made it to production, but it was a valuable experience communicating back and forth on the design and playing with color for a change.

Plesiosaur - Dinosaur Illustration

Here's a plesiosaur working on a snack!  I recently drew this illustration for a dear friend, being her favorite of our dinosaur ancestors.  It was fun to transcribe my prehistoric obsession underwater for a change!  Good opportunities here for gritty grey tones and squiggly shapes.  This is something I'd like to explore further down the line to really push the textures and lighting some more. 

'Lava' Volcano Illustration

Following my asteroid and prehistoric valley illustrations, I wanted to do one focusing on the erupting volcano.  This one is a 5x7, pen & ink on ampersand claybord (uninked white scratchboard).

This was a fun start to my day over coffee and heavy metal, and I thought I'd share an animated gif of the rough sketch, tighter sketch, and final inked version.

Rear Window Hitchcock Illustration

Here's another pen on scratchboard 12x16 piece, illustrating Hitchcock's classic Rear Window.  Between Rear Window and Vertigo, it seems Hitchcock took sick pleasure in throwing James Stewart out of windows, and offered prime caricature material. 

While I had planned on keeping Stewart as the focal point, after doing dozens of thumbnail drawings it just wasn't quite working.  I had one that cut Stewart out of the drawing almost completely, focusing instead on Hitchcock's enjoyment of dumping him out of the wheelchair.  Much more interesting!

Finally, here is a version done up as a mock MAD Magazine cover for the Hartford Art School MFA in Illustration program.  I haven't yet published a magazine cover, but wouldn't MAD be an incredible place to start?!  (wink, wink)

Pterodactdinner... yet another dinosaur drawing

Yet another dinosaur drawing... 8x10, pen on scratchboard.

A delectable dino dinner for drawing dorks like me, with color and 3d versions to follow. In fact, I have a feeling I will soon be starting an spin-off blog featuring my 3d drawings, which can for now be seen at AlbrightIllustration.com and facebook.com/albrightillustration.

Thanks, as always, for looking!

Drawing Process - 'Sabre Skull Valley'

 

Greetings! Today I'll to explain the process of developing my latest illustration--a prehistoric landscape on 12"x16" Claybord (Ampersand brand uninked scratchboard).  You can click any of these images to see them enlarged.

Most of this will look pretty rough and scrappy, and I guess that's kind of the point.  It takes a series of steps for me to reach the final state of what appears to be a controlled drawing.  Despite the mass of detail in the final image, I honestly don't have it all just sitting in my head ready to go.  It comes out of a lengthy process of continually refining the composition and values through a series of thumbnail drawings, rough full-size sketches, refined tracings of those sketches, and ultimately the clayboard itself.  

It sounds like a masochistic process when you think about how many times the image gets redrawn, but I've found it's actually the most reliable way for me to come to a final image that makes me happy.  So in that sense, I quite enjoy it!

I begin with a vague concept that I'd like to explore, in this case a dense prehistoric jungle with the key elements of a dragonfly and sabretooth tiger skull in the foreground with a volcano in the background.  These tiny sketches aren't meant to lock down any real detail, but simply explore different combinations of the elements in a composition that leads the eye around the page in an interesting way.

Once I have a thumbnail that I'm reasonably comfortable with, I'll cut a sheet of scrap paper to the size of my final board and do some rough sketching to explore my options.  Here I've used a light blue pencil to start, followed by a regular pencil to lock in some of the elements.  As you can see on the left image below, there's a lot of sloppy sketching going on where I'm trying different things and making intuitive compositional decisions.  

After the first rough starts to come together, I'll cut a second sheet of newsprint paper and lay it over the first on a lightbox, tracing and refining the shapes yet again.  At this point I'll still have areas that I'm not totally happy with, in which case I'll do my best to erase or just redraw over them.  You can see with the dragonfly that I'll sometimes use tracing paper to clean it up some or try variations without wearing through the paper.

I'll then do yet another tracing of the image on the lightbox to double check everything and form a template of the outlines.  This version get's laid down over the final board, sandwiching graphite transfer paper.  Using a ballpoint pen, I trace over the outlines, which leaves a light carbon copy on the clayboard that I can then finalize with micron technical pens (I prefer the 03 (.35mm) width).  

Here's an animation of the final board as it's outlined and then shaded.

I'm always singing the praises of Ampersand's Claybords, and yet again I have to say how much I enjoy working on them as opposed to paper.  Having the freedom to scratch away at the ink for texture or for corrections has truly liberated my process.  The flexibility to draw the values from light to dark, and then scratch them back again from dark to light has allowed me to literally sculpt my drawings until everything feels balanced.  It's removed the fear of going to dark and ruining hours of work, and made the whole process a lot more fun.

I've been working so much in black and white lately that my next experiment is to do a colored version of this to include in my portfolio.  Stay tuned for that, as well as a series of 3D illustration for your retro red/blue glasses!

Alice in Wonderland illustration

I just finished up my Alice in Wonderland illustration, which I am contributing to a collaborative wordless adaptation through Facebook.  

Here's a link to the album "What's The Use Of A Book Without Pictures?" by Neoflux Productions http://www.tinyurl.com/BookWithoutPictures

Any artist or photographer can join in and email to claim a paragraph, which is then posted in the facebook album, later to be collected in a PDF and perhaps printed and bound for nonprofit publication, in which case all sales will go towards printing for library submissions.  It seemed like a great opportunity to practice my compositions and ink work, and get involved in a large group effort.  And who doesn't love Alice in Wonderland?

My passage sees the loquacious Duchess blathering on while Alice politely suggests she limit her words.  The piece itself is 8x10, pen & ink on scratchboard.  For those of you interested in the typical process blogging, here are shots of some thumbnails and my rough pencils.

At first I wasn't sure which direction to follow.  I wanted to shy away from replicating the familiar character designs, but I was also a bit intimidated by the prospect of a complete redesign.  I ended up getting excited about representing the Duchess and something of a grotesque, saggy old loudmouth with an oblivious enthusiasm and unintentional domination over Alice.  I turned Alice herself away from the camera in order to place the viewer in her shoes, facing up at the overbearing Duchess.

 

And lastly, here's an example of why I love claybord so much.  After consulting with some of my illustrator friends and graduate classmates, I realized that Alice's hand at the center of the composition just called too much attention to itself and appeared to be grabbing at the Duchess's chest.  Not critical to the overall image, I decided to scratch it out and re-ink the area.  A quick and painless adjustment when using claybord.  Kind of remind you of those 'find the difference' bar games, doesn't it?

original with 'boob grab'

adjusted drawing, sans hand

Crows & Twitter

First off, I'd like to invite you to follow my Twitter posts.  While I tend to use the blog for more formal posts (finished pieces, generally), I do use Twitter a bit more frequently to post doodles, sketches, and other work-in-progress drawings.  So to keep up on what I'm doing, head over to My Twitter Page!

Today's drawing is of, well, as you can see... crows!  

On one hand I suppose crows might be considered cliche or low-brow.  But alas, like skulls, there's no denying their strength as gothic, otherworldly icons.  I might attribute my fascination with them to watching Hitchcock's The Birds as a white-knuckled child.  In any case, those of you who have read my book Stressed Out West: a nervous wordless graphic novel know that crows aren't anything new to my work... just something that's been lying dormant.  I've had the itch to get back to drawing them, and I suspect this might be the beginning of a new body of work.  Again, many more crows are up on my twitter page.  

Happy snow-day to those of you in North Texas!

Dog Portrait... yep, another!

 


Today's entry is a custom portrait of my boss's dog Hank!  I would tell you what kind of dog he is, but I don't actually know.  I've only ever seen photos of him, though I imagine he's quite the genial dogfellow... and if you're really on the ball, you might find his name hidden in the details!  Here's the original...

I've really been enjoying these mini portraits lately.  They give me a chance to let go of any conceptual concerns and just practice my techniques... mostly shading styles.  While not necessarily my best drawing, this was another great opportunity to experiment with line work.  The photo I was working from was a bit low-res or had a soft focus, so I had to tinker and invent some of the values and textures rather than copying them directly.


My favorite details are the highlights on his skin folds and background shading.  
I've been wanting to play with a background like this for awhile... not the bones specifically (although I do like them quite a bit!) but the parallel lines that break and fade at the edges.  

I see a lot of this shading style from some my favorite illustrators (R. Crumb, Patrick Arrasmith, and Mario Zucca to name a few).  Their clean, refined use of line is something I find quite elegant and really aspire to.


I may someday find I'm able to get this effect by simply lifting my pen to break the lines (as these guys most likely are), but for now I'm enjoying the flexibility of claybord for laying down lines and then breaking them with my scraper tools.  Claybord also allows me to reintroduce highlights, which I'm not likely to give up anytime soon.  


My automatic tendency is towards a more haphazard crosshatching style than my idols, but I'm going to continue working towards that nice, controlled use of parallel lines.  I may even try drawing something soon that sticks exclusively to parallel shading in lieu of the perpendicular crosshatching!

Self-Portrait with Sister & Snow

Today's drawing is a 5x7 self-portrait with my sister Lauren!  


Based on the photo below, I used micron technical pens (.35mm & .5mm) on claybord with scratched highlights.  I tried a few different things with the background but wasn't really happy with the direction until I decided to shade it black.  Once it was mostly filled in, the thought occurred to me that being a holiday photo, it made sense to throw some falling snow into the mix.

 

It's been awhile since I've done a realistic self-portrait... always weird staring at yourself for hours on end, wondering "What's wrong with this thing... my drawing or my face?!"

Mastodon vs Sabre Tooth

Greetings!  Here's an 8x10 claybord... my first in fact!  It was inspired by the legendary metal band Mastodon, something that I'd been plotting for months before I finally got to work on.  I was originally going for vicious and violent, but as is typically the case, a bit of my cute and cuddly cartoon style crept in.  Regardless, I'm really happy with the movement in the composition and the consistent texture throughout.  This was really fun to work on and definitely kicked off my new claybord obsession!

To those of you who may have seen these already, I promise to start uploading NEW drawings as soon as I'm back in my apartment and have a scanner handy!