BACKING AWAY FROM THE FASTIDIOUS

Illustrator Chris Payne sometimes roughs up his drawing surface with a brayer.  He combines ultra matte medium and thinned acrylics, rolling out a textured foundation for his pencil drawings.  

This rough surface not only leads to ragged, uneven edges around the drawing, but adds unpredictable fault lines, sometimes at the most sensitive parts of the image:

Payne is admired for his tight, realistic drawings but if he was after mere accuracy there would be no point in using a brayer to create an uneven grain on his sketchbook pages.  He clearly seems to be after  a more organic, rugged feel to the surface.  The brayer level helps to prevent Payne's meticulous drawing from becoming too precious. 

Today's state-of-the-art drawing tools offer even the most jejune art students a quick and easy path to realism.  Today's state-of-the-art audiences are increasingly insensitive to the difference, so it can be difficult for aspiring artists to resist temptation.

But stronger artists, the ones who still remember the difference between a drawing and a photograph, and aren't satisfied by the ability to simulate photographs, those are the artists worthy of our attention.  They are the ones who set out to make trouble for themselves.