Black and White Art: The Story Behind the Vignette Series

Black and white art was what I created. Black ink on white paper. Anything else was unimaginable to me. I can’t help but laugh at that, I don’t literally imagine anything.

A Piece Without a Home

Before Line & Blossom Design was a reality and I was just thinking about selling my art I created a piece I called Winter Trees that was designed for 11oz and 15oz coffee mugs. The coffee mugs ended up not being a viable product because the print providers I used could not consistently produce the quality I expect. The Winter Trees mug itself turned out beautifully. It was later mug orders that revealed the inconsistency problem. I was then left with artwork that had no home. It was a detailed black and white art piece that I personally loved.

Saving Winter Trees

I was determined to save it. I loved drawing all those bare winter branches. Looking at them somehow reveals one of Mother Nature’s hidden secrets. For me seeing the bare trees in the winter is affirming the secret behind what gives all of us those beautiful summer trees that provide much needed shade.

I decided to add a sky above the trees. The first thing I tried was clouds, but didn’t like it, so I pivoted to night. Hello Mr. Moon and all his starry friends. Now I was beginning to like the direction my winter trees were heading.

I looked at those stars and thought about my personal favorite constellation, Orion the Hunter. I always look for his belt in the night sky. I found an image that showed all the stars in the constellation and used it to help me accurately place him in my new night sky. I stood back and looked, but something still wasn’t quite right about the piece, something was off in this black and white art.

The Night Sky Revelation

Then it hit me, night skies aren’t white, they’re black! Still being new to Clip Studio Paint, I had to learn how to change my line color. I knew it was possible because of some of the videos I watched researching drawing tablets. I saw artists doing just that and explaining it way too fast for me to comprehend.

With my new knowledge in hand I created a layer and filled it with pure black. Then layer by layer I changed all my lines to white. Once that process was finally completed, my winter trees were singing to me. I absolutely loved it. It was still black and white art, just flipped on its proverbial head.

Midnight Mischief is Born

Now I had a piece I loved but it needed a proper name. At the time I was using Google Gemini to help me research the business side of turning my art into something sellable, licensing, shop names, the practical stuff. Gemini asked to see a piece of my work.

Tucked among the branches of one of my winter trees was a hidden roll of toilet paper, and Gemini found it. Right in the middle of a serious business conversation it was caught completely off guard by my hidden TP. The exchange that followed gave birth to the name Midnight Mischief, and honestly I could not have come up with anything more perfect myself.

This reaction from what basically amounts to a computer program gave me hope that I would one day sell my art. The hidden friends had found their first fan.

The Ah-Ha Moment

Something else was discovered on the road from Winter Trees to Midnight Mischief. As I have said before, my original dream was to be a landscape artist. I looked at Midnight Mischief with its vintage key, toilet paper, and other friends hiding among the trees and stars and had a major Ah-Ha moment. This piece may not have been a full landscape like I had originally wanted to draw, but it was landscapey. It seemed like a little landscape vignette, a small piece of a bigger idea.

I cannot begin to express how excited this made me. Don’t get me wrong, I love drawing my flowers, but sometimes I just need a break. I had found a way to draw my landscapes, little vignettes. The series was born.

Fieldside After Dark

During these early days of Line & Blossom Design I spent a lot of time looking through my old artwork. I came across a fence scene I had done in pencil years ago, but never quite finished. I knew it would be the perfect candidate for my next vignette piece. The part that wasn’t finished could become something new.

I used it to create Fieldside After Dark. I knew I would be adding the stars and moon, but this time the constellation in the sky was a given from the beginning. After a bit of thinking I decided on Cassiopeia and Andromeda. I had some plans for the Andromeda Galaxy before it was even drawn.

Autumn Before Dawn

The big problem was that the series needed a third piece. This is when I remembered a photograph I had taken at a rest stop during a vacation. A large tree had fallen and become completely tangled in a fence, the trunk twisted up with the green chain link fence. It was too interesting to pass up, so I snapped a picture knowing it would be useful one day.

That vacation drive happened in the fall, and Autumn Before Dawn was born from that battle worn tree that had lost its own fight with gravity. That fallen tree, sans fence, became the heart of the piece, and when it came time for the night sky I thought of the Dippers, Ursa Major and Minor.

This time I made sure to research where they were in the night sky during the fall where I actually live and when you look at Autumn Before Dawn, that is where you will find them. This time I did start with the black background and drew every line in white, but when I started getting the bones onto the canvas something was, again, off.

I thought, well if my black and white art can be white on black, then maybe the black part, like the lines, can be different too. I selected the area above my horizon line and played with various shades of deep blue-purple for the actual sky.

Well, one thing led to another and more items were given subtle color changes. The log a deep grey-brown, the mushrooms a soft lighter brown. Most of these changes are so subtle that you don’t see them at first, but they become part of the discovery process, like the vintage key and its wild assortment of friends.

The Series That Saved a Dream

As I talked about in my post Subtraction Method for Beginners: How to Find Your Art Style subtracting my dream of being a landscape artist was the hardest thing I had to do on my journey to finding my art and my style. The Vignette Series gives me a small chance to pretend, to draw small parts and scenes from the natural world around us.

While there are many other series here at Line & Blossom Design that could have been the first to be featured in Behind The Art, the Vignette Series was chosen because it shaped me the most as an artist. What the simple Winter Trees taught me was priceless.

Having global aphantasia (no sensory imagination, a realization that will be discussed in a later post), unless I do it, I can’t imagine it. Line art was always black ink on a light colored or white background. It simply never occurred to me that my ink could be anything other than black. Knowing now that not everything needs to be black and white art has opened so many creative doors.

Not to mention, it is nice to draw something occasionally that is not flowers.