creepy black and white

Now for the fifth set of artworks for assessment to the London Art College's correspondence course D6 Illustrating Children's Books.

Of the set, the first part is a smaller project, which was an exercise in black and white work, with a creepy Halloween vibe.

The brief went something like this:

​Take a vertical sheet of A4 paper and leave the middle third of it blank. On the left hand side use more white on black and on the right hand side use more black on white. Shapes on each side should complement but not repeat each other, because this is to be an illustration foremost and not a pattern.

​Everything starts with a sketch. So here is the initial idea in pencil.

That idea got refined a bit, and tested to see how it would go 'black and white' wise with black watercolour.

Trying to work white on black, and then black on white, is guaranteed to make your head spin. I wasn't happy with how some of the elements were working together, so I did another test page to see if I could make the witch's scarf and broom better on one side and the cauldron on the other side.

From these tests, it was clear that in order to get consistent black and white contrast, I was going to need to use nib ink. 

It was now time to start the final art. Here is the initial pencil stage.

And how it looked after the nib ink was done. It was going to have to go into Photoshop to clean out the pencil marks, and to adjust the area where the candle flame and the broom exhaust meet, and to add whiskers to the cat.

The whole Photoshop cleaning process took longer than doing the slow nib ink work, but it was well worth doing to get this result.

This was a challenging exercise to do. I enjoyed the challenge, but I'd have to have either a really clear idea or simpler shapes to consider doing something similar in the future.