With my work being so heavily focused on black and white I’ve recently really been trying to crack down on that aspect and find out how I can further the style.
This branches off into two paths. Working out every tone between black and white ala artists such as Bernie Wrightson or Brian Bolland or working out what details to omit resulting in a stronger piece overall ala Frank Millar or Mike Mignola.
I recently was lucky enough to meet and talk to Frank Millar in person and I think it really lit a fire under me.
Although I was already a colossal fan it got me looking at all his work all over again and especially at how he drew certain characters.
He has an incredible sense of what to leave out of a drawing as still have it show as clear as if he had drawn it all, that was a massive inspiration on these drawings.
Another massive inspiration to me at the moment is a show about manga artists called ‘Manben’. It shows a series of Japanese artists inking their comic pages, usually with a metal nib and seeing how they worked and layered their lines to shape their images really made me look a little harder into how I do the same both digitally and traditionally.
The show is also where the experimentation with screen tone has come from.
Whilst scrolling through my instagram feed one of the photographers I follow had posted a woman posing in a hood similar to this.
Whilst I’m not into it personally I thought it was pretty cool how it seemed to condense the face down to its basic features and I felt like it was something that would look great portrayed in stark black and white.
(There are four in this series, Keep scrolling down!)