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.

Design and Drawing: Simple vs. Complex

I was looking at a news story about this Frank Miller drawing from "The Dark Knight". It just sold for a record amount of money.

If you click on this thumbnail you can see a giant version of the panel.

The first thing that struck me when I glanced at it was the area of Robin's cape. It's so simply drawn - just an empty and interesting shape. There's no interior lines defining the fabric of her cape, which at first glance, might seem strange - especially when you look at all the lines on the inside of Batman's cape.

I know when I first started drawing, I learned how to draw things and then always drew them the same way each time...I struggled so much with learning anatomy and the overwhelming task of learning how to draw everything that if I found a way to draw something that worked, I stuck with it whenever I could.

When I first started drawing I read everything I could about how things were built and put together (especially the human body). When I went to life drawing I worked hard to draw everything so it was "put together right".

These are great things to work on and very important for making a good drawing. But there are other things that go into making a good drawing, and using design principles as you draw is very important. Once you start down the path of doing anything visual - anything at all - design comes into play, whether the person creating the visual is aware of it or not. So the best artists keep design elements in mind and use them to their advantage at all times.

Life drawing by Glen Keane. A good example that a knowledge of anatomy plus use of design elements to create a beautiful drawing, instead of just a record of what's in front of you.

So when I looked at the Dark Knight illustration, the blank cape seemed like a really good example of (what I like to think of as) simple vs. complex.

I'm sure there's a better name for it, but that's how I think of it.

So, logically, you might think Frank Miller would fill in lines in the cape so that it looked just like Batman's cape. Logically, isn't it strange that two capes within the same drawing - presumably even made of the same material - would look pretty much the same and have the same line treatment? (These are the type of things I used to wonder all the time when I first started drawing). But it makes a lot of sense if you look at it with design in mind - you always want to lay simple areas next to complex ones.

In other words, put areas with a lot more detail next to areas with a lot less detail.

In the Frank Miller drawing, he uses lots of detail on Batman and Robin's forms to describe them. Therefore, since the cape overlaps Batman, it looks far better to have it create a clean swath of blank area laid over his areas of detail. It works really well to create the illusion that it's really overlapping his forms and that there's a three-dimensional, solid figure lying behind that cape.

Also, detail tends to draw our eye to it so Miller kept the detail isolated to the more important and interesting areas...the places he wanted your eyes to be attracted and to linger.

And then, since Batman's cape overlaps an empty night sky, it would have made no sense to keep his cape blank and free of interior lines. So Miller laid in some lines there to describe the form (and keep from having an empty space overlapping an empty space....that wouldn't be interesting and creates no sense of depth).

There's another good example of this in the background. Where the background skyscraper overlaps the skyscraper behind it in the distance, he left little blank "cushions" of white like a halo around the foreground skyscraper, so he wouldn't be creating a complicated area of detail right next to another. The little blank areas create a little breathing room between the two areas of detail.


Like most aspects of design, this concept is absurdly obvious. It wouldn't make any sense to put two complicated areas next to each other - that would be a confusing mess. It would be hard to tell where one area ended and the other began. For example, compare the two versions of the same sketch below:

You can see how the drawing with detail on every inch of the drawing is a mess and creates a ton of visual confusion.

Likewise, putting two blank areas next to each other is pretty meaningless. Neither space has more emphasis or weight and there's no statement being made. A page from a coloring book is a good example of why this looks pretty uninteresting.

Some more examples of simple vs. complex used well. Rembrandt:

Bill Watterson uses alternating areas of detail and empty space to suggest depth in the bottom panel:

Mignola (using a similar background treatment):

Jordi Bernet:

Blank doesn't always meant white...in this Bernet drawing, he uses both white and black shapes for his empty spaces. Throwing things into silhouette is a great way to minimize excessive detail and simplify your composition (the Mignola drawing above does this well too).

And here's a look at the final color version of the Frank Miller drawing. There's a subtle color variation within Robin's yellow cape, to keep it from becoming a flat lifeless shape, but not enough contrast to kill Miller's original concept of it as an empty space within the composition.

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).