These drawings from the James McMullan Collection caught my eye as we were preparing for McMullan’s Masters Series exhibition coming up this fall (more on that later). McMullan’s art will often combine fine pen lines with gentle watercolor but this is one of the few examples I know of where he (like Chwast and Glaser) utilized actual layering for the mechanical; in this case, the pen drawing was printed on a transparent overlay on top of an original watercolor. I love this piece because it’s so carefully constructed; the reader of the magazine article has no idea how each layer stands so beautifully on its own. The colorful base layer is a slightly more abstracted version of McMullan’s trademark watercolor illustrations. The top layer is more unusual (for him): a highly detailed, cross-hatched comic strip style line drawing.

This post also appears on our Picturebox blog.