Frank's Sketchbook Entry of the Day

I was thinking about other things that are very black & white oriented to draw, and thought what about a black and white movie, where there's a simple background, like a stage curtain and the performers are wearing black and white tuxedos? I couldn't find any still images that I liked, but found a few clips of the song and dance number, paused on a part that had a composition or pose of the characters that I liked, did a screen capture, and used that plus a thresholded version as a reference.

In the screen capture version, the tuxedos are visible since it's really grayscale. I can do some hatching and stippling and stuff to simulate that, but the white pens that I have have some limitations (or I'm still figuring out how to use them). So I kind of made do with what I had. Of course this is the Putting on the Ritz scene from Young Frankenstein. I was concerned about how Dr. Frankenstein (Gene Wilder) was looking and did a good bit of revising of some original lines (my black pen is getting pretty gunked up by the white ink I'm drawing over), but it actually took shape OK. The Monster (Peter Boyle) was somehow easier, maybe because his features are simpler and he is standing there with no expression. The proportional sizes of the two came out pretty well. I used some features from both the screen capture and the monotone/thresholded image. For example, the eyes were mostly all shadow which was boring, and the Monster's right hand holding his cane at the bottom wasn't visible and I added suggestions of buttons on the Monster's jacket. The glittery curtain is hard to tell what it is, but it has some pattern so it's not all black. The bottom right is brighter because it's part of the spotlight on the two of them that's hitting the curtain, which in the monotone image just looks like more white patterns. Also, the suggestions of the black top hats worked OK and I took a few liberties with the white bow ties adding a few more shadows to give more of an outline of their shape.

The full resolution image is here.