Great advances have been made lately in the “screening” of pencil drawings, and in taking out the lights of a sketch (as pointed out on page 127), and results have been obtained by careful draughtsmen during the last six months which a year ago would have been considered impossible. These results have been obtained principally by good printing and paper—allowing of a fine grain on the block—but where the illustration has to be prepared for printing, say 5,000 an hour, off rotary machines, a coarser grain has to be used, producing the “Berlin wool pattern” effect on the page, with which we are all familiar in newspapers.
Let us now look at two examples of wash drawing by process, lent by the proprietors of Black and White.
No. XXVII.
This is a good average example of what to expect by the half-tone process from a wash drawing. That the result is tame and monotonous is no fault of the artist, whose work could have been more brightly rendered by wood engraving.
That “it is better to have this process than bad wood engraving” is the opinion of nearly all illustrators of to-day. The artist sees his own work, at any rate, if through a veil of fog and gloom which is meant for sunshine!
But the time is coming when the public will hardly rest content with such results as these.