Light Revealed: Scratchboard Engravings by Scott McKowen - Hardcover

by Scott McKowen (Illustrator), Peter Hinton (Introduction by)

285 glorious illustrations celebrate the scratchboard art of Scott McKowen.

"McKowen is a scratchboard master, creating theater posters and book covers of fantastic clarity, shrewd wit and subtle mystery. McKowen's mastery of line and texture, gift for arresting juxtapositions and perspectives, and fluency in drawing the human figure make for complex and breathtaking images that are at once old-fashioned and cutting edge."
--Booklist on McKowen's 2009 retrospective, A Fine Line

"It's hard to decide what's cooler about Scott McKowen's poster art: the astonishing, elegant design and linework, or the way he tips your preconceptions on their head and does something unexpected with every assignment. Luckily, we do not have to make a choice. It's all here."
--Neil Gaiman

Scratchboard artists use sharp instruments to etch lines into a board support layered with white chalk, silver foil and black ink to expose the white and grey surfaces underneath. Color, if used, is then added to make a spectacular work reminiscent of traditional woodcutting but as rich and dynamic as any full color painting. Because it is a reductive process -- you cannot fix mistakes -- it is considered one of the most difficult artistic techniques.

In Light Revealed, scratchboard master artist Scott McKowen builds on his 2009 retrospective, A Fine Line, with a personal selection of more than 150 new works. He gives a detailed analysis of each piece and describes what influenced his design. He includes images of the reference works he consulted during the conceptual process and talks about the struggles he had arriving at a design solution. He also discusses the influence and advantages of technological developments, such as Photoshop, which have carried the medium into the 21st century.

Author Biography

Scott McKowen is a renowned and prolific scratchboard artist who has worked in the medium for more than four decades. His illustrations have been featured in hundreds of books, magazines, theater posters and comic books. He may be best known for illustrating Neil Gaiman's Marvel Comics series 1602 and for several titles in the Sterling Unabridged Classics children's book series, as well as theater posters that capture the essence of plays by Shakespeare, Chekhov, Molière and other great playwrights.

Peter Hinton is a theatre director, playwright and dramaturg known for staging memorable productions of both classic and contemporary plays. He was Artistic Director of the National Arts Centre English Theatre from 2005 to 2012, and has worked extensively across North America since then, especially at the Shaw Festival and Stratford Festival. In 2018 he directed the premiere of Rufus Wainwright�s opera Hadrian at the Canadian Opera Company.