On occasions when you, yourself, are allowed to decide whether you will do a drawing for a client in line or half-tone, you cannot let your personal preferences override what you know of the methods to be employed in reproducing it and the quality of the paper used. For example, even though you much prefer working in wash to drawing with a pen, and though the dress you are required to draw is full of lustre and detail, do not let these considerations persuade you to make a wash drawing of it, if you know that it has to appear to advantage in a paper whose standard screen is 50 or 55 or even 65. If distortion or simplification there must be, let it be in the process of a calculated interpretation of the dress as a simple line drawing, rather than in the degradation of a beautiful wash drawing by unsuitable reproduction. This may sound terribly obvious, but so often in daily and Sunday papers I see admirable wash drawings quite failing to hold their own beside line drawings, done with inferior skill. To put the whole thing in a rather cheap nut-shell, half-tone is more expressive but, when reproduced, is often less impressive.

All this certainly does not mean that you are never to do a wash drawing for a daily paper ; but when you do, remember to keep the drawings very simple, using only two or three tones well contrasted. An artist who, whether by knowledge or instinct, keeps her work well within these limits and reproduces admirably is Bevis who works for the Daily Express.

To return to half-tone in cases where the art editor omits to tell you specifically how you are to treat your drawing, there are one or two things you

will do well to know, because in the long run the artist who saves his client's money is doubly precious. A journal or a shop has to pay by the square inch for each block they order. The cheapest kind of half-tone drawing to reproduce is the squared up half-tone. The lady adjusting her skis on pi. 40 is an example of this, and so is the drawing by Pollard (pi. 33). The latter could never be anything else, the former has been squared up as an economy, being by nature a cut-out. A circle or oval costs very little more. The next more expensive is a vignette or a simple cut-out. The drawings by Luza on pi. 25 is a simple cut-out; that by Luza on pi. 26 is rather less simple, but would be charged as such. The reason that there is any extra charge at all for a cut-out is that the edges have all to be cut by hand in the first place. In charging for a block, the overall dimensions are taken. The drawing by Rhys (pi. 5) is uneconomically arranged, as the block-maker would be charging for an area almost double that of the actual drawing. Here the effect easily justifies the extra expense, and with a paper like Harper's Bazaar economy is not such a fetish as with some, but such a spacious arrangement would be out of the question with most magazines.

Next more expensive is a block made from an intricate cut-out, an example of this being the drawing by Marty (pi. 29) or that by Rhys (pi. 35).

It often happens that in catalogue work cut-out half-tone figures are used. If you are asked to study expense you must remember that by drawing hands on hips, with arms akimbo, you are introducing extra outline, as the area contained by the arm and the side of the body has all to be cut away. In the same way figures with umbrellas that touch the ground are enclosing unnecessary space. Of course in a long series of figures some must stand extravagantly, but you will please your client by your consideration of these things.

Costs have already mounted considerably, an intricate cut-out costing about is. Sd. per square inch as against a squared up half-tone at nd. and a line block at 6d.

Yet dearer is a half-tone block which requires to have the whites deep-etched. You will notice that the drawing by Demachy (pi. 31), though it contains passages that seem to be white, has none as white as the page that surrounds it. If, however, he had wanted to have some passages of dazzling white somewhere in his drawing, these would have had to be deep-etched. In the drawing of children on pi. 28a, the blocks were intricate half-tone cut-outs, with deep-etched whites on the hair of each child, and freely sprinkled over the dressing gown of the top but one. This use of deep-etched whites gives an added freshness to anything which you want to appear dainty and light. In doing satin, however, even when this is white, sufficient brilliance of high light can be suggested by the passage of shadow and reflected light.

Drawings done in pencil, conte pencil or even charcoal, are made into deep-etched half-tone blocks ; an example of pencil being the drawing by Tejada

(pi. 17), of conte the one by Woodruff (pi. 32), and of charcoal the one by Grenet (pi. 1).

A combination of line and half-tone is expensive to reproduce and had best be avoided altogether unless specifically ordered. There is no example of it in this book, nor is it particularly expressive, though it is sometimes useful for dainty lingerie, motor cars or decorative spots.

Apart from the actual medium in which it is done, there are some things to be remembered about the size and arrangement of a drawing. It is probably needless to tell you that there is an extra charge for reducing a drawing more than one-sixth (linear measurement), as you are unlikely to do your work six times too high ; but it is well to know that a very long block is charged as if the shorter side were at least a quarter of the longer side : thus a drawing 16 inches by 3 inches is charged as if it were 16 inches by 4 inches.

Suppose you are doing a double spread, consisting of eight single figures, entirely disconnected except for the fact that they are to receive an equal reduction and to appear on the same pages, always draw them in pairs, making each figure close to the other in the pair (pi. 6 was done in this way). When you realise that the minimum area charged for a block is 14 square inches, you can see that, since a single figure may easily come within an area of 6 and i| inches but will yet cost the same as if its area was 14 square inches, it is an obvious saving to place another single figure close to it so that the pair will not take up an area of more than, say, 6 inches by 3 inches. The block, when made, can be cut, so that the figures may, if necessary, be printed on separate pages. Do not be over zealous and put more than two figures together in this way, as there is an extra charge if three or more separate entities are mounted up together, so it is not worth it. An example of this treatment of single figures may be found (if you have the back numbers) in Vogue, December 9th, 1931 (pp. 44 and 45). Of course, the editor could paste your figures up in pairs before sending them to the block-makers, but you can save him trouble, especially if your drawings are done on boards, which are difficult to cut and remount. This arrangement of single figures in pairs does not only apply when a reduced single figure comes below the minimum. A certain amount of the extra space that is inevitable round any figure can be eliminated by putting two together.

Fashion Drawing Sections

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