A Fine Line

A glorious celebration of the scratchboard art of Scott McKowen.Scratchboard artists use sharp instruments to scratch lines in areas of black ink on a prepared surface of hard chalk, exposing the white surface underneath. The finished drawings are then scanned, and the color is added digitally. The result is spectacular, similar to traditional woodcutting but in full color.Scott McKowen is a renowned and prolific scratchboard artist and illustrator whose art has been featured in hundreds of books, magazines, theater posters and comic books. He may be best known for illustrating Neil Gamain's Marvel Comics series 1602 and the Unabridged Classics series.A Fine Line is the artist's personal selection of 203 full-color and black-and-white reproductions. In a revealing twist on the traditional art book, McKowen gives a detailed analysis of each piece and describes what influenced his design. He even includes images of the reference works he consulted during the conceptual process and talks about the struggles he had arriving at a design solution.