I’m gonna roll the dice again. First of all, thank you for that illuminating look at your creative process. With no intent beyond my own -probably misguided- observations, I am gonna say that I see elements of your forebears in your work. Obviously, you have finished pages that PCR wrote and plotted. Craig is fantastic, and I see elements of his line work in your sensibilities.
I have met Andy Kubert at a number of cons and I see so very much of Joe’s body language in Andy’s work that I feared mentioning it.
Your work is… like Craig’s but it seems less laborious. I see Erte in your work, and I see Finlay.
Who influenced and still influences you? Who’s art books crowd your shelves? Do you listen to music when you draw?
I wouldn't say Craig was a formative influence on my work. Craig was working as an inker when I first discovered him, not as a pencil artist. His inking was very elaborate and highly detailed. He was working on projects like "Son of Satan" for Marvel. This is him inking over Sonny Trinidad.
So while I was aware of Craig's work back in my formative years, this is what I was aware of, not his later projects where his own style is so obvious. I wouldn't say this looks much like his work now nor mine.
I am sure we had similar formative influences on our later work, such as Art Nouveau and Deco, which is why we may have a similar line sense now, though.
I am deliberately following Craig's lead on American Gods and Norse Mythology because I want to keep to a holistic stylistic sense on the project. However, I am not doing much line rendering on it, not as much as Craig would, because I do all my own color. I know what I intend the final art to look like, and it is more economical to do the rendering directly in color than it is to go from pencil, to ink, to color.
So my line work on Norse Mythology is simple like this. But still, almost no rendering, as in no little detail lines to round the forms. Why?
Because I will do all that final rendering in the color.
Note that I also do not leave the lines in black. I convert then to a deep sepia.
I wouldn't say my work is less elaborate than Craig's. It simply depends on the project.
My line work on Snow, Glass, Apples, which I did independently, is very highly detailed. Like this.
And again, details, but no rendering because I do my own color.
My work on Snow, Glass, Apples is based on one of my greatest influences, Irish Arts and Crafts Master Harry Clarke. In a review of the work, a blogger falsely stated that my work wasn't as elaborate as Clarke's because I had deadlines to meet. I don't know where she got that idea, because I certainly never said it as she suggested I did.
As you can see, my linework is very clean because my linework is almost always very clean. I do that on purpose; it's not a deadline choice. Harry Clarke's art is so heavily rendered that it would be hard to read in a series of comic book panels, not to mention all those tiny little lines would look like mud in color. I have trouble telling what I'm looking at with that central figure.
This kind of line density is just hard to process. It would interfere with the reading experience over a half dozen panels per page. Also, all of that tiny hatching is just not going to take color well. So, I simplify.
Note how Harry Clarke's own color work has a much simpler line sense as well.
When working in black and white, the line serves where color does not. When you work in color, you leave out lines you don't need.
Finlay is not an influence on my work at all. I had a brief period when I was a teenager where I did some stippled work, because that was sort of what all the SF artists where doing when they worked in black and white. But I really didn't care for it much. Not that I don't appreciate Finlay, but that I don't want to draw like that.
I went through a period in the 1990's where I began adding a lot of rendering to my art. This was due to pressure from editors and general market pressure which found my work too simple. Here's a page from that period from A Distant Soil.
There's a lot of noodling in the line work there that I would leave off now simply because I'm trying to give the figures form. This was intended to be printed in black and white. This looks fussy and awkward to my eyes now.
However, just a few years before, I was drawing A Distant Soil with this cleaner, more stylized approach below, which is actually closer to what I do now. And it is more Deco and Nouveau in approach.
While this piece is years earlier than the above piece, I think it has more style and confidence when relying on simpler, cleaner forms than the later work. This page was never published.
I returned to this approach on A Distant Soil eventually, as you see below in my more recent pages. This is a portion of the same scene redrawn and expanded.
Detail work is reserved for decorative elements, architecture, and costumes. Not for rendering on forms.
Some people say I got this from manga. But I didn't. My line sense comes from classic illustrators and artists of the Golden Age of Illustration. When I discovered manga, I liked it because it was similar to what I already saw and liked, not because it was formative.
Manga fans were few and far between when I discovered it in the 1980's and I would put references to it in the backgrounds of my work as in jokes, such as in the piece above this one. That's Maraich and BanCoran from Patalliro in the upper right background. I would never do this in my work now, but back then, it was common.
My influences: Harry Clarke, Aubrey Beardsley, Beatrix Potter, Tasha Tudor, Edmund DuLac, Dugald Walker, Rose O'Neill, Ivan Bilibin, Erte, Hal Foster, Howard Pyle, Kinuko Craft, Alphonse Mucha, the Pre-Raphaelites, Nestor Redondo, Sulamith Wulfing, John Austen. For starters.
I have been studying P Craig Russell's line work more now, and think it has had a recent influence on my sense of form. I know there was a brief period in the 80's where I also studied his line a bit, but I don't really think it had much of an influence back then.
I do listen to music while I work, and that changes per my mood. I often listen to audiobooks.
A DISTANT SOIL is available HERE: https://amzn.to/3squpfx
