FIGURING IT OUT

I've been looking at a lot of Charles Dana Gibson and James Montgomery Flagg lately and it has a had a profound affect on my art. More than any artist in a long, long time. The growth I have been experiencing is evident in my most current Holliday pages. It really helped me establish mood for scenes that my be lighter (in mood and actual light) and not have massive black shadows in every scene. So the lines that I was using to describe form was being used as a value as well. Now, that is much easier to do in a well lit environment, but it can be hard mixing the mark making of line with heavy shadows. I really couldn't look at Gibson and Flagg for that, they never really did publish any heavy shadow work with ink, so I had to play around a lot to figure it out. This sketch is one where a lot of things started to click and found that balance of mass shadows and lines to help define form.