A Fine Line: Scratchboard Illustrations

This collection showcases the career of McKowen, a scratchboard artist who designs theater posters and illustrates for books and magazines. Discussing his creative process and the influences behind some of his most successful images in straightforward language, McKowen explains how he tailors his theater posters to each director's individual vision; some of the most dazzling are designs for Macbeth, Chekhov's Three Sisters, and Shaw's Candida. In 2003, Sterling commissioned McKowen for a series of classic book reissues, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Alice in Wonderland. Those images, also included, manage to capture the depth and scope of epic stories in a single, precise, stunning image; in his introduction, director Christopher Newton aptly describes McKowen's style as ""a lightness of heart which is not afraid to acknowledge the proximity of darkness."" It isn't until the book's final section that McKowen gets specific about the scratchboard medium-""black ink covers the chalk surface, and lines are created by scraping through the black ink""-which allows for far more detail than other printmaking methods. McKowen goes on to explain recent technological developments in scratchboard, including the use of Photoshop for color, rather than ink.