Darktouch
- DARKTOUCH - A black ink and gray pencil drawing on an 11 x 14 size vellum paper. It appeared in, "Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine," Jan. 1980 as a double title page illustration for the story, "Darktouch," by Somtow Sucharitkul.
Knowing that this drawing would be a double page spread in the magazine, I divided the composition so that the center of the picture would contain nothing of importance visually because that section of the drawing would be lost in the "gutter," where the staples in the spine would squeeze the center of the picture.
You would be surprised at how many times a picture in a magazine is destroyed visually, because the main subject in the drawing is squeezed in the gutter. Even as a young SF fan, when I was buying and collecting SF magazines, I would get annoyed when I saw the most important part of a drawing lost in the gutter.
Sometimes the artist is at fault because he knows that the drawing will be used as a double page spread, so why he would place the most important part of his drawing in the center of the composition is beyond me.
And sometimes the magazine layout person is at fault, I have seen a single full-page drawing positioned in the middle so that half of it is on the left side page and half on the right side page. The center of the picture is buried in the stapled gutter of the magazine. That really irks me, especially when the drawing is a portrait and I am looking at a face squeezed in the gutter!
By the time I became a freelance illustrator I was already aware of the problem and did my best to avoid it.
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