Whether pen and ink, lithograph, engraving, or woodcut, the basic elements of black and white art leave little room for variation. For instance, this simple botanical line drawing to the right, and the drawing Branch With Leaves by Vincent Van Gogh, are lovely but not overly exciting. Artists can vary the pressure on the pen or the thickness of the line to achieve differences in tone, but ultimately there are two values - black and white. No colors, no grays, no shadows. So how do artists show value, tone, gradations, modeling, and shading to give life and dimension to their piece? That is the challenge.
In the next example, an arrangement of hangers, more excitement is generated because of the bold placement of the black and white shapes. But it's still a limited effort. Clearly, this form of art - black and white - has vastly more potential.
Van Gogh was highly skilled at expressive pen and ink work. Often he completed these drawings as preliminary sketches for his paintings, but they are beautiful and masterful in their own right. In the drawing Farmhouse with Wheat Field Along a Road (interestingly done in brown ink on yellow paper) Van Gogh uses strong cross hatching in the tree, line work in the grass, and stipple (dots) in the far off field to give variation and depth to the scene. Again in Cypresses with Two Women in the Foreground, the drawing is filled with swirls, unusual cross hatch marks, circles, and dots that give its subjects texture and life.
Gustave Doré, considered to be the greatest French book illustrator of all time, produced a prodigious amount of lithographs. He is especially famous for his illustrations for The Divine Comedy, particularly The Inferno, for Don Quixote, Perrault's Fairy Tales, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven. In this pen and ink drawing from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Doré uses strong cross hatching and sketchy line work to portray the shadows cast by the candle and to accentuate the features of the character. In The Organ in the Court (scroll down to picture no. 2) the line work, while still varied and textured, is extremely refined and detailed, giving this piece an elegant look. It's difficult to realize there are only two values in this piece - black and white. As the line work becomes more finely detailed, the appearance of the use of gray and of shadowing seems apparent.
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