I was looking at some of Booth’s images on-line yesterday prior to my commenting. He did some beautiful work, I can see why you want to base your work on his style. Anyway I wanted to see how he handled sky’s because the convention with pen and ink illustrators was to have breaks in long lines that are used as fill, breaks would be staggered so not to create a visual pattern, but the breaks would have made printing the lines easier back in the days of metal plates. It doesn’t look like Booth used breaks in his lines, but as many have mentioned he was copying wood cuts. Notice that in the reference you gave me the sky areas aren’t very wide compared to the rest of the image.

I did notice that his line thickness vary, of course he would have been using a dip pen and such pens run out of ink, also it is hard to keep pressure on a nib completely uniform, so there would be variations in the line regardless. I know you can’t get that with markers and probably do with your dip pen pieces so it is just something to think about when selecting a marking tool. It also looks to me that he used at least a couple of different sized nibs, one very fine and another (or several others) that made thicker lines, there is a lot of variation with his line thickness. Some of that could be pressure on the pen, but I would guess that he also used different tips.

Don’t know if besides studying Booth’s work you have also studied wood cut illustrations, but you might think about doing some research on them. Observing directly what he was trying to copy might give you some additional insights.

Whatever, keep up the good work. I keep telling myself that I need to get back to my dip pens and keep getting distracted with other projects, one of these days.

[B]@hoplite[/B]: Thanks for the comment. I wasn’t aware that Booth used scratchboard. I’ve got a couple of small pieces that I will play around with someday. It does make sense when I look at some his dark areas with very fine white lines. Also, I am a big Wrightson fan (especially his [I]Frankenstein[/I]). I am in awe of his control with a brush. That’s another thing I would like to devote some time to in the future.

I completely forgot that I saw the originals to the Wrightson Frankenstein ($1100 each as I recall it, quite some time ago). But you can see that they were all adding ink to the page rather than scraping it away. It was a funny sequence in that Booth adapted one method to emulate another, and then Wrightson adapted a third to adapt the adaptation. So, you don’t have to go to scratchboard to get the look – but it is something to play with.

This may be a USA/UK difference in terminology, I don’t know, but in UK speech a woodcut strictly refers to a picture cut into the side of a plank (like Durer’s work) whereas a wood engraving is cut into the end grain of a very hard wood & is usually much smaller than a side grain cut woodcut.
The reason I mention this is that the two methods differ so much in their size & method of manufacture , tools used etc, that it is important to differentiate to understand the final resulting picture. BTW. have a look at Thomas Bewick’s wood engravings, he was a pioneer of the technique & took it to new heights that arguably have never been equalled since.

Hoplite , that’s very interesting that you say Booth used scratchboard – I’ve read many contemporary pen men & commentators specifically referring to his pen technique, usually in terms of its’ unsuitability for the pen ! Could you perhaps give me a link or book reference or even a drawing where scratch board was definitely used because I would like to chase this up for myself ?

Hoplite , that’s very interesting that you say Booth used scratchboard – I’ve read many contemporary pen men & commentators specifically referring to his pen technique, usually in terms of its’ unsuitability for the pen ! Could you perhaps give me a link or book reference or even a drawing where scratch board was definitely used because I would like to chase this up for myself ?

Alas that a bunch of my books are packed away where I can’t get at them easily. The book I have (somewhere, dangit) is The Art of Franklin Booth (Nostalgia Press). There are newer collections out there. I believe in Franklin Booth, American Illustrator, it specifically describes his technique, which was a combination of traditional pen and brush ink, combined with scratchboard (whiteboard, where there is no ink already applied). The trick was to seamlessly combine the techniques so it was often difficult to tell where the one stopped and the other started. Virgil Finlay was another master of this, though his style was very different.

Most of the images on-line are simply too small to readily discern the technique used. Just put in “Franklin Booth Images” into a search engine and go spelunking.