Artist research: Robert Ingpen

I looked into a few classic Children's books and one of the few that first came to mind were those by author Charles Dickens. I managed to find A Christmas Carol, which was illustrated by Robert Ingpen.

I scanned a few examples of his drawings. His style is incredibly detailed and realistic, and very few aspects of the characters were "cartooned".

What intrigues me are his pencil sketches. The toning helps to accentuate the details in the features, and most of them tend to be worked over stained paper.  

Perhaps Ingpen obtained his subject matter through observational resources in order to achieve such high level of detail. Some of them appear to be unfinished, only picking out the important features with tone.

His works are very dark and sinister from what the non-coloured sketches portray. Again there is  constant use of washed background worked over with graphite, pencil and charcoal.

Ingpen uses rich, bold colours on certain areas, in this case mainly to suggest importance of the scene; warm colours were used to convey warmth and vice versa. The stained backgrounds play a part in this as well, acting as a contrasting hue to accentuate the main subjects.