Franklin Booth

The journey to pen & ink mastery: 15 lessons learned

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It started in October 2023. I used to fill sketchbooks with superheroes and sci-fi vehicles when I was a kid, but I hadn’t really touched it seriously in decades. Then I came across one of the marvelous Sketching From The Imagination books from 3DTotal, and it blew my mind! The idea of drafting my own concept art to summon up interesting ideas for the novels and games of Salt Mystic intrigued me.

But I sucked. And I’m hoping to keep that in the past tense, but we’re not there yet.

I wrote here before about some art advice I’ve picked up along the way, one of which crippled my drawing for a very long time. That post contains a couple of sketchbook updates to keep me honest and working to improve. It’s not super fun to share a journey because I would prefer anybody stopping by Grailrunner to check us out think that I’m a powerhouse of creativity and master craftsman of the imagination.

Still, maybe I’ll get better if I’m periodically embarrassing myself!

Then I took a road trip with my wife this past summer to the Mississippi Blues Trail and came across a hardbound compilation of 1890’s era Harper’s Magazines. I wrote that up in I Found a Pen & Ink Masterclass in an Old Antique Mall. Suddenly, traditional pen & ink became an obsession as I saw what Charles Dana Gibson and Franklin Booth and guys like that could do! My Booth research culminated in Franklin Booth: Engraver of Light and a trip out to see the Indiana house where he grew up and kept a studio. I also got the chance to interview a modern-day ink wonder-worker with Mateusz Lenart.

So what’s your process to learn and practice?

Two sketchbooks now. One is for drawing from imagination or freehand with cobbled-together references. That’s to work on my ability to reproduce things I’m looking at with tweaks and from different angles, and to experiment and be messier. For the other sketchbook, I generate a clean reference digitally with stock images, AI elements, or a combination of these, then trace the outline with a light table and work from the reference for rendering.

Any particular destination in mind here?

I’d like to combine the visual storytelling of Norman Rockwell, the ink style of Bernie Wrightson, and the sci-fi visual innovation of Juan Gimenez. That isn’t too much to ask, is it? Specific artists I’m looking at for their ink work are Charles Dana Gibson, Franklin Booth, Sergio Toppi, Bernie Wrightson, and Joseph Clement Coll.

Wrightson. I mean…do yourself a favor and take a look at these!

So what have you learned?

Let’s do the countdown, shall we? Fifteen things I’ve learned in practicing traditional pen & ink and analyzing the masters:

#15 Using references is not cheating

I’ve got a love/hate relationship with using references because copying things wasn’t why I originally got onto this train, you know? Still, images in my head fade too quickly for me to look inward and draw what I see there. You do what you’ve gotta do, right? It’s been enlightening for me to see just how many professional artists use photographs and composite stock images for their references.

#14 Professionals work in layers

The masters lay down their structure, they build deep shadows, they add texture, and their pictures often look terrible in progress as it seems they’re destroying their own work. Then it somehow, magically, takes shape in the final product. The picture doesn’t have to spontaneously drop onto the page fully formed. It builds in layers. To be honest, I’m still struggling with this one, but I know there’s truth here.

#13 Strategic overlaps simulate depth

I couldn’t figure out why my grass, weeds, and trees in practice landscapes looked so awful and flat. It was driving me crazy. Then I took a photo of some plants growing by a lake near my house and made a strong effort to make the thick blades translucent and allow some shadow of a leaf behind it to be implied. That was a watercolor painting, but it got me thinking. Then a Stephen Travers tutorial on Youtube spelled it out for me that I was rushing my plants and tree limbs with flicks of the pen when a few strategically placed blades or limbs up front with detail, contrasted with flicks behind them and shadows below them would imply exactly enough to look FAR better.

#12 Texture matters more than hatching

I know this is true, but I can’t make my hands do it. Driving me nuts, honestly! But I’m abusing hatching and slapping lines everywhere to add shadows and it’s looking like washed-out, hairy messes at times. I see a guy like Alphonso Dunn teaching texture and realize what I’m doing wrong. You’ll see a couple of leaf studies in the accountability sketchbook below where I bottomed out on this. It’s something I’m keeping in mind as I work to improve, not something I’ve mastered.

#11 Simplify the reference and find the story

Photos capture everything. Reproducing them is compelling. It feels like practice. Then when I’m done, somehow the photo looks fine with all that detail and my drawing looks like a bowl of spaghetti fell on the paper. I’ve come to realize that “focal points” and “guiding lines” in a drawing really work, and that the viewers’ eyes really can be steered. Practically every professional artist seems to be saying the same thing on this – start with what story you want to tell, then draw only that. Just hint at everything else, and try not to even do that.

#10 Contrast is what pulls forward on the page, not line weight

I had been getting the impression from on-line inker tutorials and an Arthur Guptill book that dark shadows and heavy line weights look like they’re closer and lighter lines look farther away. In the sketchbook at the bottom of this post, you’ll see a drawing of a girl and a horse with a spilled water bucket where this came home for me. I needed the girl and horse to look closer, but there were dark shadows behind them in the stall, which crippled me. I mean, if I darken the shadows, the figures will be lighter and will look farther away when that’s the opposite of what I wanted! I realized with that one that contrast is what draws the eye, not darkness, so uniform shadow behind them is A-OK.

#9 Leave rest areas

This is a study I did of a Franklin Booth masterpiece. I usually feel a strange compulsion to fill the entire image with stuff. Can’t help it. Seems like the job. Then you see a composition like this where he leaves that wide open space for water, and you really get the importance of leaving something without details to keep things from getting busy.

#8 Shadows should be bold, should connect, and should be interesting

I first learned this from a watercolor artist named Matthew White. He kept going on about “connecting your shadows”, and “make them interesting”, and for a long while, I had no idea what he getting at. In my head, if the reference has deep shadows, then add them. If it doesn’t, then don’t. Then you realize at some point that you’re not trying to copy the reference and there are emotions at play here with values, shapes, and configurations. Just like a bass guitar anchors music and things sound thin and weaker without it, the deep shadows are an anchor for the image.

#7 Outlines are okay, but be smart about them

“Things in the real world don’t have outlines.” That was the art advice that threw me for decades. I couldn’t see how to draw something without putting a pencil or pen to paper at the edges. With pencil, it was easier to smudge and add gray areas, so not quite as bad. But when you switch to pen & ink, every time the tip touches the paper, it’s crisp black. Walter Crane in Line & Form stated something in words that I was noticing with the ink masters – you can avoid outlines entirely by effective use of contrast.

However, outlines can also be fine with a smaller tip (like 0.005 liners) or if you break them up in the highlighted areas where the light is hitting.

#6 Think in clumps and masses for hair

Trying to draw hundreds of lines to simulate hair is crazy. It turns out that hair, much like foliage and grass, can be clustered into value patterns – basically grouped highlights and grouped shadow shapes. In the highlighted area of hair, a few well-placed strokes hints enough for the viewer’s brain to fill in the rest.

#5 Work in larger formats if you can

I think in 5 x 8 and 7 x 10 formats because sketchbooks often come like that, and it’s where I’m always putting my drawings. I have found, however, that many of the impossibly detailed drawings that catch my eye weren’t made in a pocket sketchbook. They were on much larger Bristol board or something like it. They were built large with room to breathe, and became sharp and complex when shrunk down in reproduction on the page or on a website. This comes to mind when I’m squinting at a drawing and switching to my finest liner to try and make something visually impressive at a small scale.

#4 Line hierarchy

As a kid or in school, I drew with just the one ballpoint pen and never considered needing different thicknesses. It wouldn’t have dawned on me to do so. Those early 20th century ink masters were using dip fountain pens which flexed to allow for varying thickness – but good luck keeping yourself in reasonably priced fountain pens and ink these days. Ahhh- but brush pens! Like the Pentel Sign Brush Pen that has that cool, stiff and tiny brush you can push on. And liner sets like Pigma and Uni, with multiple options to choose from. I have found that varying line thickness is visually appealing, and strategic use of bold lines for emphasis and lighter lines for highlights can help lead the viewer’s eyes.

#3 A good drawing can save bad rendering, but a bad drawing is hopeless

A weak composition or poor drawing absolutely cannot be saved by even superb hatching and shadows. It just looks like mud, and mistakes on faces or eyes or with the perspective are obvious no matter how awesome your rendering. I’ve seen that pencil drawings restrain me too much and make the drawings too clean, which I need to fix. But I’ve also seen how wobbly and searching my lines are when I don’t do a pencil drawing. I’m wondering if a very light, minimal pencil drawing that I use like a jazz score might be the compromise I need.

#2 Restraint looks better than over-working – the viewer needs less than you think

I over-work my drawings. Definitely. It happened even today, with me thinking this very thought. Every pass of hatching on the most recent drawing in the sketchbook, I thought to myself – easy…that’s probably enough. Then I kept hatching. I don’t know why. It’s crazy. Anyway, professional artists render much less than feels like they should. They hint where I draw. I’m especially bad with eyeballs; some of the professional works I’ve analyzed barely stroke the pen to suggest eyes where I’m drawing little ovals and working like crazy to make it look good. Nah…restraint is better than spelling everything out. Stop early.

#1 You can still fade distant objects with pen & ink

This one’s funny. I’ve tried a few landscapes where, like a dummy ignoring the lessons even in this post, I’ve meticulously tried to simulate everything in the distance and modified the hatching to experiment with every kind of value you can imagine. Then, I was watching Stephen Travers (below) draw a building on the shore with a city in the distance. I thought to myself as he got started – oh, man, is that detail going to look like a big, messy pizza when you’re done! But he used much thinner lines and wider spacing with fewer marks in the distance to avoid rendering everything equally and it looked amazing. The focus was right where he wanted it – on the building up close.

Okay, that’s a pretty good list. Let’s see that sketchbook then!

Let’s do it. Be kind.

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And that’s what I wanted to bring you today. I hope it’s okay to share these lessons learned as I go, even though I’ve got so much room to improve.

Till next time,

Franklin Booth: Engraver of Light

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I have some marvelous freebies for you today, so stick with me.

I’ve been burrowing into a particular rabbit hole these recent weeks, studying and practicing traditional pen & ink drawing. It started with this:

That’s interior art for SALT MYSTIC: BOOK OF LOTS. I did it, but I cheated. The base gunslinger was a couple of AI-generated pieces, drained of color and mashed together, cleaned up a bit, and mashed into an original 3D render of the plasma weapon on his forearm. I composited all that into the one image for a splash page as you first open the book.

But it got me thinking that this idea of grungey ink drawings as interior art looks really great and could be a nice distinguishing factor in future Grailrunner books. So I started practicing and studying the great ink masters (which you can read about here) to hone my craft and work directly Pigma Micron and Pentel Brush Pen on paper. No blending modes, no AI bases, no 3d paintovers or stock image composites. No digital tricks at all. Just pen and ink and paper and the satisfying swoosh sound that makes.

It’s a life changer, honestly. But anyway, it led me to Bernie Wrightson and Sergio Toppi and the guy I want to talk about today: Franklin Booth.

I’d ask you to keep in mind that the pen & ink artist has exactly one way to generate values and shadows, and that’s with black marks. Usually, lines. If they want shades of gray, they draw lines.

Like this:

I mean, just take a look at some of those drawings by Booth! The patience and craftmanship is insane! Honestly, I wanted to learn more about the guy and found that it’s kind of difficult to do that. He didn’t make much of a splash with his personality or how he lived his life – just with his work. Here’s a great, though short, overview of him and his work on Youtube.

We’re also several posts in to a new ongoing series here on Grailrunner called CONVERSATIONS FROM THE ABYSS where we’re applying AI tools in some innovative ways as a sort of experimental lab. That got me thinking I’d like to read a decent, illustrated biography of Booth and get to know him a little better, mainly to understand his influences and how he learned to do what he did. So I had ChatGPT write me one and it was terrible. I asked for a 50k word detailed biography and got slop. Seriously, at one point I even asked it why the final product was so bad when it suggested we work section by section in much shorter passages with me approving things along the way.

Yes, I could just buy Silent Symphony from Flesk Publications, but that’s beside the point!

I tried iterating section by section, making my own suggestions as we went till it started to take a kind of shape that might be worth reading. Then I scavenged the internet and the Internet Archive specifically to grab public domain images that were either referenced in the sections or appropriate to the time period being described, all done by Booth himself. We’re not selling you anything here – the final product will be the last download button on this post. I included them as well throughout the text.

In all that, I learned about the fantasy play he illustrated titled Flying Islands of the Night by James Whitcomb Riley, which you can peruse below by smashing the splash page below. It’s vintage beauty at its finest.

I found a scan of a 1925 book containing 60 reproductions of Booth’s drawings with sourcing and titles, details which are almost impossible to find on the internet (as everyone just posts the pictures out of context). That’s available by smashing the title page here:

And here’s a real gemstone that I found which took on an entirely different function than its author intended: a 1916 travelogue written by Theodore Dreiser where he went on a road trip with Booth himself! It’s called A Hoosier Holiday, available by smashing the title page button below:

Where Dreiser thought he’d describe the trip and his musings along the way, I found an intimate and first-hand means of hearing Booth’s exact words, descriptions of his facial expressions and the fact that he ate all the popcorn he could get his hands on, things and sites he found interesting, and even charcoal sketches he made along the way. I found Dreiser to be an arrogant nuisance, but Booth seemed genuinely like a guy I’d road trip with. I liked him even more after reading it.

It was Booth’s 1916 Pathfinder, by the way, which he paid $3k for ($100k in today’s money), and they had a chauffeur as well. Booth was doing pretty well for himself, it seemed.

Quick and painful anecdote – ChatGPT was including factual errors. Some were easy to find, like a bold statement that Booth never married when that was demonstrably untrue. It provided several explicit quotes, which I asked it to source. Each time I called out something like that, it bailed and said it made those up. I think that’s my fault, as I’d named some historians I like as the basis for the voice and tone the software should take to write the text, and it took that to mean it should hallucinate.

Anyway, I wanted to find and include Booth’s very first published illustration. Turned out, the first amateur publication was in a newspaper, which I found in a publicly available scan and screenshotted to included in the book. That was a great find. But ChatGPT was telling me his first professional published work was in a trade magazine called The Inland Printer. I eyeballed 6 years worth of that stupid magazine and found zippo from Booth, eventually going back to call ChatGPT out on that as well. Sheepishly, it admitted that internet claims suggest he appeared in that magazine but since I’d looked and couldn’t find it, it supposed that was incorrect.

But the book I wanted to read was taking shape and becoming something worth spending time reading. The illustrations were helpful and interesting. I liked what I was getting, but it needed one final flourish.

I asked Booth to comment on his own biography.

By instructing ChatGPT to analyze everything we knew about Booth’s personality and values, I asked it at last to speak in his voice and comment on the book we’d produced about his life. That’s the final section of the book.

Here is the final product, titled FRANKLIN BOOTH: ENGRAVER OF LIGHT.

What a great journey that was! I really enjoyed the immersion and learning about this fascinating guy. Take a look and let me know what you think.

[UPDATE July 8, 2025]

I found myself in Indianapolis for business and with a half-day free, so I drove to Carmel, Indiana to the boyhood home of Franklin Booth, which is listed as a historical site though also is still a private home (in surprisingly good shape). It’s super close to a beautiful downtown, in fact walking distance…a quiet and cozy neighborhood with no sign whatsoever that a famous artist lived and worked there. Not even a plaque.

And I understand the backyard shed was where he maintained the workshop which he visited every summer and completed so many of those famous works I’ve highlighted here.

This one:

Pretty cool. Anyway, till next time,