Detailed Areas vs. Blank Areas

I have sometimes heard people say that they like certain artists because those artists cover their drawings with lots of detail. There' nothing wrong with that opinion, taste is totally subjective and I don't believe there's a "right and wrong" with art. Personally I tend to disagree with the idea that blanket detail is a good thing, though, because I think smart artists make choices....and covering everything evenly with detail is not really making a choice.

It seems that as a general rule, contrast is a key to creating works of art that are interesting to look at, and of course a contrast is created when you have blank spaces against areas of detail, as opposed to a piece of art that is all detail, or a piece that is all blank open areas.

I always hate to pick on artists, especially really good ones, and it always gets me hate mail, but as an example of what I mean, sometimes I feel the great Jack Davis uses too much detail. At least for my taste.

If it wasn't for the colors applied to this drawing, you wouldn't know where to look. The level of detail is really high (and evenly distributed) on every inch of the piece.

I can only imagine that the reason some people love a high level of detail is that some people like to look at a drawing and really spend some time with it, absorbing every detail and finding little jokes hidden by the artist. Personally, I don't. I really like art that makes a strong statement and one is which each area has an order of importance...I like it when an artist is clear about where to look first, and then where your eye should go secondarily, etc. I like it when artists make strong choices and direct your eye through their choices. To me, this Davis cover below is a mess. The values and levels of detail are all the same.

Here's a much better Jack Davis, in my opinion. The figure in the foreground has the most detail and the most black-on-white contrast, so my eye goes there first. Then the figure at the top left has the second highest level of detail and some black-on-white, but less than the central character. The rest of the piece has no areas of black-on-white and has thinner line work so it doesn't draw your eye until you've seen the other two more important figures that tell the story. The pile of bodies and street scene are just background that contribute to the idea, but don't overwhelm the more important figures.

That last piece leads nicely into another thought about detail...detail can be very helpful at getting your viewer to look where you want them to look.

 It's always a challenge to get the viewer's eye to go to the part of a drawing (or painting) that is exactly where we want them to look. And putting detail where you want to attract the eye is a good, foolproof trick. And so, for that to work, the areas where you don't want the audience to look need to be blank, or at least have less detail than the areas where you want them to look.

 Detail can also be helpful for indicating scale....things with a lot of detail tend to look bigger, if they're placed next to objects with less detail for contrast.

Detail also makes things seem closer to the viewer. Blank areas, by contrast, feel farther away.

Another thing I've heard people say is that drawings look more "realistic" to them when there's more detail on every bit of the drawing...but again, I don't see it that way. I've often read that our eyes don't even work that way. When we look at things in real life, our eyes (supposedly) see whatever we're focusing on in great detail, but the rest of our field of vision is slightly blurred and out of focus (and it increases more on the edges of our vision). If we saw everything in stark detail all the time we'd probably have a headache all the time (our eyes seem to work like our ears -  we filter out most of the sound we hear and just focus on what's important).

To me, what makes a drawing look "realistic" to me has more to do with proportions. Personally I always found, for example, Milt Caniff's drawings to be very "realistic" because the proportions are pretty "straight": not only are the figures a realistic height, but the features of the face are realistically small, not really caricatured (although he does have some cartoonier characters from time to time). I like Caniff's level of detail, it feels right and not like he's trying to overdo it in an attempt to be "realistic". He lets the proportions do that for him. Also, he uses silhouette in a smart way to minimize areas of detail. It feels like he's making choices and using design to caricature reality, not try to capture it verbatim.

Usually when artists draw pretty girls they don't put a lot of detail on their faces to keep them looking young and pretty. Too many lines on the face can start to read like wrinkles, or blemishes, or sweat, etc. So usually it's proportions that artists have to use to get that "realistic" feeling.

In this Bernet drawing below, you can see the difference between how many lines he uses on the men's faces and how many he uses on the girl's: hers has much less detail. But he uses a lot of lines on her hair and clothes to balance it out and so they both feel like they belong in the same drawing.

These Alex Toth pages have a great balance of blank black areas, blank white areas and areas of controlled detail. As an overall design, they're very easy to follow and pleasing to the eye because they have a good balance of blank areas and detailed areas.

Some more good examples, by Quentin Blake and N.C. Wyeth.

Color is Value

Once a long time ago I was trying to pick the brain of a co-worker about color. He seemed to be really good with color and I was trying to get some guidance and help. He didn't really know what to tell me. He just shrugged and said, "All you need to know is that color is value. That's it."

A simple statement, but I found it to be very helpful and insightful.

So....what does it mean? Well, value is a confusing word that gets thrown around a lot when it comes to color. But here I'm using value to mean the black, white and grey tones of a drawing (just like the last post).

So basically it means that, even though you're working with color, the painting should still work if it's converted back into a black, white and grey sketch, and should still follow the general rules about value that I talked about last post. Values in a black and white sketch are really important for clarity and readability, and they remain important when you work with color. They're just a lot harder to judge when you bring color into the equation, and it's hard to remember how important they are when you are juggling all the other aspects that color brings to the table.

Photoshop has the ability to convert any color image into black and white so that you can check your values easily if you're working digitally. Just go to the "Image" dropdown menu, then go to "Mode" and select "Grayscale" (see image below)



and Photoshop will convert your image to black, white and grey so you can check your values. Pretty cool, huh? I used this tool a lot to check my values while I was digitally coloring my comic book stories.


















I often felt that the black and white images looked better than the final color.

Then, after you've checked your values, you can just "Undo" and step backwards to your full color file.

Or you can do it the way that artists have been doing it for hundreds of years: if you squint your eyes at a painting it's easier to see the values.

Anyway, here are some paintings converted to black and white so you can see how well the values work (paintings by N.C. Wyeth, Howard Pyle, Rembrandt, Earl Oliver Hurst and Norman Rockwell).

Picking the Right Moment to Illustrate

Lately I've been trying to do some illustrations and I've been thinking a lot about the question: how do you pick which moments to illustrate?

I'm no expert on illustration or any of the artists mentioned below. Just some of my thoughts these days so forgive me if I come off like I'm trying to be an authority here.....I'm decidedly not.

Animators and story artists work hard to find their "Golden Poses" - the drawings that will tell the story in the most entertaining way and describe the characters and their personalities best. I'm used to thinking that way...but those disciplines are all about a series of images that you view in sequence and they add up to a very specific story. With illustration you have to pick one moment and one moment only.

Part of what motivated me to think about this was something that happened at Comic Con. I was visiting Bud Plant's book stall and they actually gave me a free book for spending a certain amount there. The book was the collected works of illustrator Norman Saunders...a giant hulking book chock full of his paintings and illustrations.



Norman Saunders painted a lot of different subject matters and seemed proficient in many styles. More than anything, though, he seems to have painted a lot of pulp covers. When you look at so many of them collected in one place, certain things become obvious. When you think about the purpose of the illustrations - which I assume was to sell the lurid, violent and titillating subject matter to people who were looking for that - you can see why they all share certain traits.

They're usually paintings that capture moments of extreme action - someone is about to get stabbed, or decapitated, or dropped into a vat of hot oil, and more often than not there's a gun going off.



It made me think about the work of other illustrators, artists like Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth. Their illustrations served a different purpose - they usually accompanied stories in magazines and were printed in illustrated novels, and they were trying to capture a different kind of feeling than the pulps, to encapsulate the different kind of literature they accompanied.

They sometimes painted scenes of action but more than anything they seemed to paint moments of stillness that were fraught with tension and drama - the potential for action instead of the capturing the actual moment of action.

To me there's much more to this second kind of illustration because it tells a story better. A painting of a person shooting a gun is really just about shooting a gun. It's such a dramatic and extreme moment that you can't add any other shading or subtext or secondary story. If you tried to, it would be overwhelmed by the powerful statement of the gun going off.

I'm not attacking pulp covers for being inferior or anything. This isn't an argument over who's a better painter or anything or what type of story or subject matter is superior. That comes down to a personal choice. And each type of art was for a specific and different purpose. However, speaking just for me, I really gravitate towards the way Pyle and Wyeth chose their moments. It invites me to look longer and harder at their work, looking at all the characters as I delve into the moment and experience the story through all of the different characters in the piece. With pulp you can get the whole story at a glance (that's the point) and they're all about being as pushed as they can be dramatically in order to catch your eye on a crowded bookshelf. There's no subtext and in all fairness there's not meant to be. With Wyeth and Pyle you can read their work at a glance but then I also find them intriguing and atmospheric enough that I get caught up in them, looking them over and finding more to them as I study them. I haven't read most of the stories that their paintings are supposed to accompany, of course, but their paintings are so great that they stand alone and are clear and dramatic without needing the accompanying text (which I've read they did purposely).

Here's an example from "Treasure Island" - a small action shown (attaching the British Flag to the improvised flagpole) that has very big dramatic meaning: they are raising the British Flag over their fort to defy the pirates who are laying siege to their fort.



Interesting that he chose this moment of small action that is a preparation for the big dramatic action to come. He could have painted the dramatic moment of raising the Union Jack in all of it's defiant glory...but he didn't. He chose this more weighty, pensive moment instead. One choice is more obvious, in-your-face drama, and the other creates more of a picture of the drama to come in your imagination. This choice seems to place more emphasis on their choice to raise the flag...rather than the actual raising of the flag. If that makes any sense.....


Pyle's famous illustration of a marooned pirate. Of course the stillness and emptiness are completely appropriate for the subject matter; being marooned is all about being completely alone. So a scene of action would make no sense. But a good example of how a "static" image can have lots of dramatic weight, and how composition palette and body language can all work in concert to tell a powerful story.




Below is another classic Pyle that tells a clear story with drama and tension. My impression is that the pirates have sacked the town and are questioning some official of the city to find out if there is more treasure hidden somewhere. Is he defiant? Has he already told them all that he can? Do they believe him? What will be his fate when they are done?



The composition of the pirates who are towering above the lone figure and surround him, as well as the heaps of treasure in the corners all add up well and - again - really make great use of body language, posture and composition to tell the story. We know at a glance who is in power and who is not.


Another good example. This one is by Wyeth and is called "Frontier Trapper".



More Wyeth...








Wyeth and Pyle sometimes did paint moments of violent conflict but I've never seen one that was portrayed in a lurid, gory, in-your-face way. In these examples they seem to consciously set the violence back away from the viewer and they pointedly don't exploit the kind of extreme and inherently dramatic camera angles that you might in a comic book or a pulp book cover. They don't use the typical "dramatic lighting" (by which I mean theatrical light - very contrasty light and dark) that a pulp cover usually does to achieve drama. There's a distinct lack of blood and gore and a careful treatment of the characters that seems much more restrained than on the pulp covers.

Here's a Wyeth...



...and a Pyle.



Also, of course, in general the palettes that Wyeth and Pyle use are much more muted and earth-bound that what you would find in most Pulp covers. So that gives their paintings a more muted and serious feel. Again, all of which is intentional...the Pulps are supposed to feel caricatured and stylized, just like the literature they accompany.


One of the Wyeth paintings for Cooper's writings...I'm not sure if this is from "Last of the Mohicans" or another book in the series. The action is painted in his usual style but this is the most cartoony painting of his I've seen. So, again, sometimes he did paint scenes of extreme action...but the treatment is far different from the pulp style of illustration. It still seems grounded in reality and, somehow, entirely possible physically.




On the Pulp covers, by contrast, there's always a real emphasis on the faces of the characters and their big expressions. The figures are usually posed to make sure that all the faces are turned towards the viewer so we can see their expressions. And their emotions are almost always very extreme ones: usually horror or terror (on the women) and usually grim determination on the men....






In the end it's interesting and informative to compare the two styles. A lot of times, the choice of moment in time we chose to capture, along with where we place the "camera" (or the viewer) to witness that moment can have an incredible effect on the viewer's emotional response to the final image. When people talk about illustration they talk a lot about the technical side because that's a huge part of working as an illustrator...but there hasn't been a lot of talk that I've ever seen about how to pick the moments to illustrate, and as I've been trying to tackle my own paintings, I've gotten a lot out of looking at different artists and what choices they made.