Many artists will tell you a pencil creates some of the best art. Most art, whether paintings, cartoons, illustrations, or even digital art, begins with pencil drawings. As a cartoonist, I draw everything first with a pencil and then ink over the pencil lines, which is the exact same process I use for my digital cartoons. And I think one of the secrets many artists know but probably won’t say out loud is that it usually looks infinitely better as just a pencil drawing. Ink may make everything easier to read and to print, but it also tends to cover subtleties and, therefore, personality. It’s possible to restore some of that personality if you’re using a medium such as oil paint, where you can recreate subtle tones. In this piece I call “Linda Smells a Lie,” I wanted to create a cartoon completely in pencil. What you may notice is that even though the face has a high level of exaggeration, there is something about it that also feels real. Natural. That’s the pencil working in there. If I had put ink over this pencil drawing, I could recreate some of the tones with crosshatching, but I would never be able to reestablish the warmth of the pencil layer. I think pencil portraits are popular for this very reason. There is something warm and personal about them. We even get that feeling from black-and-white photography and film, something that color can rarely duplicate. So, Linda here may be catching a whiff of the lie that more color and darker lines are better.
What do you think? Do you agree with Linda?
If you’d like to purchase “Linda Smells a Lie,” check its availability in my studio shop.
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