High Contrast Illustration

The Image above is a sample one of my own. It is of Hattori Hanzo, from the Samurai Shodown game series. It was entirely drawn in pencil, and probably took me as much time to do as most color works.

But people don't seem as attracted to B&W! I always have found this a shame. I love the values and contrast of Black and White works. In some ways, I find them more attractive than color works. It's the perfect way to display works that are bold, and are meant to get your attention.

This is a good reason why, every once in a while, I like to turn by the classic movie channels, and watch a a few minutes of older movies. The way they employ "Halo" lighting, to make characters stand out from the background, and the ways lighting is used to add mood to a scene... it's just very impressive to see how much can be conveyed, with such a limited set of values.

And, for that matter... that's also something I love about manga! Some of the panels in works like Gunsmith Cats, for car chases and gun battles, are as lively to me as anything I've seen in animation.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that I enjoy lots of art styles that depend on their inherit limits. Pencil and pen work, manga screentoning, and pixel work. On the artist side, they all force you to think more creatively than if you had colors, or, in the case of pixel work, higher resolutions.

On the viewer side, they force you to use your imaginations more. A light shade of grey could be a light red, blue, or yellow to the viewer, and this enables them to see characters and settings in the ways they want to. And with pixel art, we can suggest the eyes and mouth, but a lot of the finer points are "filled in" by the viewer. Game characters in pixels very rarely have finely detailed lips, but a few dots can suggest this. When you think of Mario in the old Nintendo games, do you remember him as a bunch of messy squares, or as a rounded, short man with a mustache?

I hope I can continue to show my love for "limited" forms of artwork here. I see a lot of people who don't "get it" when it comes to these things. This is my way, to try and enlighten those people.