Monochrome Drawing

 From what I have seen in a few of the contextual references I've looked at, many illustrators tend to use limited colour palettes or monochrome. The conclusion I have drawn from this, is that it is on the whole cheaper. It may take less time to colour the panels and printing is generally cheaper if you only use one colour ink. 

I wanted to explore how I might approach a monochrome palette, so began drawing in my sketchbook. I chose to draw a cafe scene, as I wanted to build a better picture of what the first chapter of my novel looked like. I have purposefully left out much of the descriptions in the writing, as I wanted the illustrations to illuminate all of the details.

Although I quite like how this looks overall, there are some areas that I would like to improve on. I think there are some really interesting textures, but the image looks quite flat overall. I don't think I achieved very good contrast - it would benefit from some areas being blocked out in black ink. I could have also used a grey wash in some areas to add to the tonal values.

One thing I really disliked about this process, was how time consuming it was, and the permanence of each line. 

In response to this, I started to investigate what a character could look like in monochrome but using a digital drawing process. I used a 'dry ink' brush because I wanted to create some organic textures, and a halftone brush. As this character wears a lot of black/dark colours, I had to find ways to separate these so that the shapes didn't end up merging together. This was a really useful exercise because it forced me to consider the light source and how to make individual parts of the drawing pop.

Although I do generally work digitally, I don't usually approach it in this way. I would usually add in colour, gradients/blends. So it was useful to approach this drawing method from an analogue lens. I'd really like to see how I could use this process to design some screen prints - perhaps some short form/zines exploring various parts of witchcraft.