Balik
- BALIK - A black ink and black color pencil drawing on an 11 x 14 size coquille board. It appears on the cover of "Balik", a fanzine that was written and published by Clifford Bird, assisted by his wife, Sheila.
In the mid 1970s I was attempting to use a variety of drawing papers so I could try a variety of drawing techniques. This drawing was done on coquille board which is a "dimpled" paper, it has a texture that allows an artist to achieve the illusion of "shading" on a drawing, to make an area appear to go from dark to light even though "black" is the only tone in the shaded area. You achieve this effect by pressing the black pencil down on the area where you want it to appear dark, crushing the dimples so that none of the white of the paper appears in that area. As you go toward the area you want to appear light, you lessen the pressure against the dimples so that some of the white of the paper begins to appear, and as you continue to lessen the pressure more white appears. Eventually, you are pressing just hard enough to blacken the tips of the dimples in the lightest area.
This technique, often referred to as "stipple," is useful when a publisher uses cheap, low quality paper that is incapable of reproducing pictures with delicate shades of "gray". On this textured (stipple) paper the smallest dot is still "black", so there is less chance of losing any of the light shaded parts of a drawing. I used coquille board often, for both fanzine and professional publications.
The famous illustrator, Virgil Finlay did not use coquille board to do illustrations for the pulps, but he did use a stipple technique to overcome the inadequacies of the cheap paper they used. He used a very thin pen-point that he dipped into an ink bottle and made each dot on a drawing one at a time; thousands of dots in a relatively dark area, reducing the number of dots as he "shaded" his way to the lightest area. I don't know where he got that kind of patience, and amazingly he did it over his entire career. I consider the best of his drawings to be masterpieces.
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