Continuing the real-life saga of one man’s struggle against his art materials!

Is it always necessary for backgrounds to contain less detail than foregrounds?

The answer to this, of course, is no. It all depends on the effect you are trying to achieve in a particular panel. If you want a background to recede in space in the manner of aerial perspective — as discussed last week — it usually helps to reduce the amount of detail in the background.

Sometimes, however, increasing the amount of detail can actually make an area recede.

Let’s say you draw the many individual hairs of a fur skin — all having the same length, thickness, and direction — so that when looked at from a normal reading distance the fur appears to take on a single tone. Though you may have spent hours drawing in every detail, in the end the area appears as little more than a grey tone that will tend to recede behind any nearby object with higher contrast and, in this case, fewer details.

The important thing to consider here is contrast. The use of detail, when it creates contrast to other areas around it, will attract a viewer’s attention. It is contrast, not detail, that draws a reader’s eye.

So what, exactly, do you mean by contrast?

When working in black and white, adjacent areas that differ the most in value almost always command the greatest attention. Black type on a white page. The black pupil set against the white of the eye. A black silhouette against a bright window. An explosion in the night sky.

Wherever a significant amount of black and white are set off starkly against one another, this is where your eye will surely look. Think of the spotlights in a darkened theater: your eye is naturally drawn to the highest contrast in the room.

As the value difference between two neighboring regions is reduced, to say a dark grey against a light grey, the attention demanded by that area tends to decrease accordingly, until the two values are indistinguishable and the area becomes wholly uninteresting to the eye (unless of course this new area now comes into contrast with another adjacent area).

In addition to value contrast, there are other contrasts that are also important in graphic work, particularly inking. Contrast between line direction, smooth vs. rough lines, continuous vs. broken lines, thick vs. thin lines, fixed-width vs. variable-width lines, straight vs. curved lines, and line thicknesses: all these contribute more or less to drawing a reader’s attention and leading the eye across the page.

And this is the ultimate goal of the artist as storyteller: to capture your reader’s attention, draw them in to your story, and move them from moment to moment (both within and between panels) at a pace you dictate.

Contrast helps to achieve this.

Next Wednesday: I’ll talk about spatial layers and contrasts in: Inking with a brush part 18!

Continuing the real-life saga of one man’s struggle against his art materials!

After a long delay due to pressing outside projects — one of which you can read about next door in the Bulletins section — let me get back to talking about inking, and more specifically, about inking backgrounds.

Now that we’ve inked the figures and all other foreground objects with a brush, it’s time to fill in the backgrounds. I don’t always wait till the end to ink in the backgrounds, though. Sometimes I’ll do them as I go, and sometimes I’ll wait. It all depends on how I’m feeling at the time.

More often than not, however, I ink backgrounds with a pen as opposed to a brush. I often use a Micron disposable pen, usually in the 0.1mm size, though sometimes a 0.3 or larger. Occasionally I’ll mix in a technical pen or a dip pen — if the latter, usually a crow quill.

A non-dip pen, however, offers a solid line without any variation, which allows the background to recede behind the foreground. Since the variable width of the brushed line on the foreground objects has greater dynamic power, it commands greater attention than the relatively fixed width of a pen line. For this same reason, I generally keep the width of the background lines thinner than the foreground lines, making the lines less bold and therefore less attention-grabbing.

Thinner background lines also add a sense of aerial perspective to the background. If you’re unfamiliar with the notion of aerial perspective, it states that objects of the same local color become more blue/grey as they recede into the distance, and that their values become lighter. This explains how, when looking over distant hills, the farthest ones seem hazier, bluer, and somewhat lighter than the nearest ones.

This effect is reinforced by reducing the details in the background as well. As a rule of thumb, the closer an object is, the more detail it will contain, and the higher the contrast will be between its lightest and darkest parts — by which I mean when you squint at an object in the frame, the closest objects tend to have the greatest mix of hard whites versus hard blacks, while objects that are farther away will tend more toward a single value, either all white, all black, or all one value of grey.

This rule of thumb applies mostly for simple panels. But for more complex panels, where there are a greater number of spatial layers or where you want to draw the reader’s eye between competing layers, there’s a different theory of spatial layering that comes into play that I will discuss next week.

In any case, it’s not always necessary to reduce the amount of black in the background to get it to recede. Sometimes, especially in enclosed spaces, I like my backgrounds to blend into black. This helps the background recede since the object with the greater contrast (more hard white on hard black) remains in the foreground while the background turns more toward a single value, in this case black.

By the way, when using a lot of black in the background, I’ll generally use a brush to fill this in, so much of this work may have been done concurrent with working on the foreground figures. But even if the background is mostly black, if there are straight lines or regular curves to be found I’ll usually use a pen against a straightedge or french curve or circle/ellipse template to put any of these lines in, after which I can then fill them in with the brush.

I also tend to use a brush in the background for organic textures: cave walls, trees, plants, &c.

Next Wednesday: I’ll talk about more complex panels and how to separate spatial layers using value in: Inking With a Brush, part 17!

Continuing the real-life saga of one man’s struggle against his art materials!

As promised last week, I want to touch on the subject of filling in large areas of black on your page.

Usually, in the course of inking a page, I’ll have filled in many of the smaller areas of black already, often as a way to get excess ink off the brush after dipping, so I can start inking finer lines than a full brush will allow. But when it comes to filling in large areas of black, I tend to leave them till the very end of inking a page for a couple of reasons.

First, I like having areas on the page where I can try out a line without worrying about messing it up.

Let’s say, for instance, that I want to make a line of a certain length that starts thin and gets thick, as I might if I were feathering into a shadow area. In that case I might try out the line once or twice in one of the areas that will later be covered by black. I’ll try a couple of strokes, and when I get it just the way I want it, while I’m still in the rhythm of making that particular line, I quickly move to the live area and make that stroke or strokes again.

If I had to use a scrap piece of paper, it could still be done, but I think it’s simply easier for your hand to retain the memory of how to make that particular line when you can get right to it without having to go back and forth between pieces of paper.

Second, since I generally ink on 2-ply bristol board, I find that filling in large areas of black tends to warp the board a little, sometimes quite a lot if the black area is very large.

This has the tendency to make fine line work near the warped area quite difficult because of the uneven surface it creates. Therefore, I like to make sure I’ve finished all the tricky line work in an area before filling in the blacks nearby.

I’ve found that the warping depends on the quality of the bristol board as well as its thickness. As you might expect, a 3-ply board warps much less (if at all) compared to a 2-ply board. But also the higher the quality of the board, the less warping it allows: Strathmore 500 series gives much less warping than the 400 series.

Warping also depends on the ink used, as some inks tend to be absorbed more and produce more warping than others.

Finally, I tend to wait till the very end of my inking session to fill in blacks because I like to switch to a larger, older brush for painting in large areas of black.

A Winsor and Newton #2 is generally too small to conveniently lay black into areas larger than a square inch or two. You’ll find you have to dip every few seconds just to keep enough ink on the brush to do the job. A #3 is better, but I like to use a #4 or larger. I can still get a decent point at the tip, which allows me good control at edges and corners, but it also holds enough ink that I’m not always dipping.

Also, I want to extend of the life of my good #2 brush as much as possible, and I’m guessing scrubbing a lot of black across a page might not be the best idea for this. Why shorten the life of your best brushes, when an older or cheaper brush will do?

For me, it’s an old #4 student grade brush, and I don’t care if it gets beat up!

Next Wednesday: I’ll talk about working on backgrounds in: Inking With a Brush, part 16!

Continuing the real-life saga of one man’s struggle against his art materials!

Last week I began discussing how I attack a typical panel, from first dipping the brush in ink until the brush becomes too dry for normal inking. You’ll recognize this when the ink coming off the brush no longer makes a solid line but gives a broken or grey line instead. Usually you’ll simply want to dip the brush back into the ink and start the whole process over that I described last week.

However, this is also the perfect time to employ something called dry brush technique. As the brush dries, the hairs at the tip start to separate and act as a kind of fan on the paper, laying down wispy strokes in light greyish tones.

I sometimes use this technique to work into hair, to soften forms or edges, or where I think the contrast from light to dark is too abrupt. There are other means to achieve these ends but dry brush has a unique softness you can’t achieve any other way.

As you work the brush further using dry brush technique, eventually the brush gets so dry you can’t control the mark you’re making – either you have to apply the brush several times just to make a mark of any kind, or the brush gets clumpy and the mark goes from being too light to abruptly too dark. Further dry brush work at this point is mostly useless, so it’s time to dip the brush in ink again.

The drawback of letting the brush go this dry is that you need to wash the brush out more often, since you’ll get dry flakes of carbon in the bristles that will eventually clog the brush and prevent the ink from flowing smoothly onto the paper, making the rest of your inking that day more difficult.

If left to dry without cleaning, the carbon build-up at the base of the brush will eventually prevent the brush from forming a good point, thereby ruining the brush. However, some artists say they prefer a little build-up at the base and that it actually helps hold the point longer over the brush’s life by cementing the hairs together at the ferrule. I personally haven’t tried this, but as with many things involved in the art of brush inking, you’ll eventually form your own preferences as you try different techniques.

Currently, my preference is to wash my brush after each 15 minute period of inking (I’ll talk in the future about how to wash your brush without ruining it).

All told, with the #2 Winsor and Newton brush I normally use (I also use a #3, but I’ve been using the #2 the most of late), the time it takes from dipping the brush in ink till the end of useful dry brush work is somewhere in the 5 to 7 minute range. I find I usually dip the brush two or three times in a 15 minute period, unless I’m filling in a lot of black areas, in which case it will be more.

Next Wednesday: I talk about filling in large areas of black on a page in: Inking With a Brush, part 15!

Continuing the real-life saga of one man’s struggle against his art materials!

Now that I’ve set the stage, let me talk about how I attack a typical panel.

I start with something simple, especially if I’m not fully warmed up. I find it’s best not to go for faces right away, but if you have to (say, the panel is a big close-up), start with something that doesn’t need long careful lines – like eyebrows or hair.

If I’ve just dipped the brush and it’s full of ink, I actually find it’s best to work on large areas of shadow if there are any. This way I can work some of the ink out of the brush until it comes to a decent point. You can also work out some of the ink on your scrap bristol.

As you work the ink out of the brush, the tip can hold a progressively finer point and you can therefore achieve greater control. So I suggest you always start with broad strokes and big outlines when your brush is full of ink. Once the amount of ink in the brush allows you to achieve a thinner line, begin working on smaller outlines, around smaller figures or faces.

When the brush is no longer full of ink but well before is starts getting dry, I try a couple of longer lines as a test (I do this either in the shadow areas that I will later cover in black or on my scrap of bristol). When I’m satisfied I have good control and enough ink that the brush is not going to go dry on me, this is when I attack larger sections of feathering – long parallel strokes, either straight or in gentle curves, laid down close together without a lot of variation in line width. Basically these create a grey tone to the eye.

If I’m feeling really good, I’ll sometimes go for feathering that employs lines that are slightly thicker in the middle of the stroke yet come to sharp points on either end. These are the strokes that really add life to a form, giving the illusion that a surface is going subtly from light to dark to light again, like any rounded form under most lighting conditions actually does.

Later, just before the brush goes dry, is when I do the really small details – pupils, wrinkles around eyes and noses, and so on. This is also when I do the lightest feathering, say to model the features on the face, around the nose or eyes or checks.

Next Wednesday: More about working a page in: Inking With a Brush, part 14!