Pen and ink artists, most notoriously in comics, often lean into hard shadows for composition, turning one shape into another with a chiaroscuro effect, or usin

Pen and ink artists, most notoriously in comics, often lean into hard shadows for composition, turning one shape into another with a chiaroscuro effect, or using false shadow shapes to indicate form. Extreme examples often come up in Alex Toth or Frank Miller panels, but every cartoonist working in black and white struggles to create theatrical staging, and while many take the route of extensive hatch lines to describe medium values, there's an urge to simplify for efficiency. Frank Frazetta also did a lot of ink work before his well known fantasy paintings, and it shows up in some characteristic decisions about what he simplifies. "Framed Ink" shows off a lot of these methods, using a rough ink style to emphasize the composition. Since the appearance of digital color, the common approaches to ink in comics have toned down because the painting process creates a competing value structure. The mixture of hard and soft shadow creates some jarring effects, so ink lines made "for color" are used more often just to describe form.