Zorn and Sergio toppi analysis -

Currently I am taking Viktor's "drawing deconstructed" schoolism class among others and he brought to my attention some things to learn from the artist Zorn in how it is that he created the awesome line art pieces he did. I wanted to take this as a time to take some notes to reiterate what I've learned and how to employ some of this technique on my next piece.

Being that these are black and white I wanted to do a more comparative analysis between two different ink artists to see if by comparing them it could help me differentiate between the two styles and since Viktor uses both of these as pieces to analyze I figured this will help me learn faster by changing it up alittle. 

Zorn

In both of these our subjects lean to one side or the other of the page with a great deal of space occupying the side of them making them the key focus but giving us room to move our eye around. For example in Zorn's piece we see the composition flows to the left and we can see how the motion of the two dancers matches with the motion of the curtain behind them being pulled back. There is a great use of value in this piece  when we look at the floor and with a simple crosshatching technique he is able to show the shadow on the floor as well as a light spot that gradually turns into a shadow shape and these same shadow shapes become the line work of her dress. 

Acouple of notes from Victors observations on this Zorn piece

-The crosshatching on the couples faces follow the shape and they slightly overlap, they are almost never a 90 degree angle. These strong lines needed to get our attention here.

-The crowd in the back is about getting the chaos of the crowd, its just tiny dots and scratches thats enough. Not a lot of detail is needed. 

-The dress of the lady are made of long strokes that slightly overlap. There is never a harsh 90 degree angle. there are more there are parts where lines dont overlap allowing the lines to breath in the white space around them. 

The backdrop curtain is important to notice because it is almost completely blacked out by using a cross blockout style inking process. 

He uses the darkest areas of the piece to hide the figures inn the background as their edges move in and out of darkness and uses the white of the paper to suggest the same thing. He made an interesting connection that the scribbles and dots could be viewed as just a low value. 

Toppi

This guys art is amazing,what I like about it is how abstract it is and at the same time this is the style he used to make his comic books. It doesn't look like a storytelling style to me, instead it looks more like design but that is the brilliance of it. Toppi took everything he learned from the old masters and added in some of his own innovation to the pen and ink style. 

For instance as we look to the left side of the figures we see how he conveys the stillness of the desert in his line choices. At the top we see the darkest line mark the top of the horizon and as it moves down the space between the lines gets bigger, but he also starts to take these same lines and break them up, some of them are squiggly like a patch of rocks, some move diagonally and get progressively shorter in their strokes until they are dots. 

When we look at parts of the drawing such as the shading on the camel, the shading of the mans arm and face or even the shading of the dress of the woman we notice a key feature in toppis style. What he seems to be doing is breaking down the "folds" and changes of direction in the clothes into geometric shapes and then uses a rough almost 90 degree crosshatching technique to block in the general values, crossing some and not crossing others to suggest the form going in and out of light or changing in values. 

Notice here that he also uses the negative space of the jewelry, the white of the face or clothes to contrast with these heavily rendered areas. He even uses more sparse lines to cross over the form of the hump on the camels back. 

Notes from viktor:

" Its crucial crosshatch has a chance to breath...dont lose the tiny dots and space inbetween that is what gives it volume and form. when we look at the arm of the man we can see its rendered very similarly to the  clothing on the woman but lighter. The musculature is suggested with heavy lines but the rest is just value. Some lines are flat killing the volume but they work as value to push the volume. Values are what push volume not the strokes themseleves, but this back and forth between lines that push value and others that break the volume is what makes sergio toppi's style so unique.