Two Kinds of White (Or, Things I Learned While Drawing Pictures)

February 5, 2024 Two Kinds of White (Or, Things I Learned While Drawing Pictures)

My digital art began as a byproduct of my comics scholarship and continues to weave in and out of it, with insights gained from one revealing and reinforcing lessons for the other. In this case, I can’t remember if the insight began in my writing and influenced my drawing or vice-versa, but either way, the two then moved forward in tandem.

Since images are more interesting to look at than text, I’ll start with three recent digital sketches:

My analytical focus has been on image backgrounds — the color of the paper comics are printed on or, in the above images, the white screen behind the black pixels of the digital art. The white isn’t actually “behind” the black, but by surrounding the dark marks the white encourages that visual effect. I know remarkably little about computers, but I think the white is made of individual pixels, same as the black marks, and is a combination of red, green, and blue pixels at full intensity. Whatever the technology, the drawing process imitates drawing on paper: I added black marks to a white surface.

What’s interesting to me, both analytically and artistically, is how the black marks produce two different kinds of white.

Explaining that requires a quick detour:

One of the first reviews of my most recent book, The Comics Form, said it was “virtually jargon-free” — which I took as a deep compliment. And yet I did spend most of a chapter distinguishing two central terms, that I need to distinguish here too:

• Discourse: physical marks on paper (or pixels in screen)
• Diegesis: the represented subject matter produced when a viewer mentally interprets the physical marks

I stole the terms from narratology, and then stipulated different (though related) meanings, which caused confusion for a different reviewer (no, this “discourse” isn’t “plot”). I find the concepts invaluable, so if you know a clearer way of presenting them, please tell me.

Now, back to white:

By adding black marks, I created two different kinds of white, discursive and diegetic.

The diegetic white occurs in the negative spaces between the black marks. I’ve drawn no marks in the area of the forehead or the nose or the cheeks, but because those white areas are interpreted as representing those facial features, the white is diegetic. I experience it differently than the white outside of the black marks, which, because the marks don’t suggest a specific background, remain “blank” and so discursively white.

I assume other viewers experience the two whites differently too, but as the person who created the image, I can also report that I experienced them differently during the creative process. I moved the black marks around (which is one of the main reasons I prefer digital art over pen and paper), experimenting with different nose lengths and cheek widths. That I experienced the white areas as a “nose” and “cheeks,” even while creating and altering them, means they were already diegetic to me.

Manipulating the two whites also revealed an ambiguity:

Even though I was the creator, I didn’t always know exactly where the discursive white stopped and the diegetic white started. Diegetically the face must have an edge, but discursively that edge is undrawn and so diegetically unspecified. I assume other viewers experience an edge, but not a precise one. That means there’s a small but intriguing area where the two whites can’t be distinguished. They merge.

Panel frames add another complexity.

Unframed, this image is similar to the first two:

But unlike the first two, the inclusion of black marks representing shoulders alters the discursive white under the chin to create the diegetic white of a “neck.” More interestingly, the lower black marks end at an abrupt and uniform horizontal edge. That edge (I assume) is interpreted discursively. The image, not the person in the image, has been cut off, because the white under the edge is experienced as discursive rather than diegetic.

Something more complicated happens when the frame edge is extended on all sides with black lines:

The black lines produce the same discursive white outside the image, but the interior white changes. While the white inside the figure is unaltered, the negative space between the black lines of the frame and the black lines of the figure are no longer discursive. At least not when I look at the image. The frame lines partition a previously discursively white area and turn it into a representational one. The figure is now standing in front of some kind of diegetic background. I can’t conclude anything about that background other than it exists. I think it exists because I experience the white as representing it. The white is diegetic.

Do framing lines always produce that effect? I’m not sure. These two figures feel different to me (independent of the abrupt change in rendering style):

The area outside the frames (including the gutter produced by their juxtaposition) is discursive white. But the two interior spaces seem ambiguous.

I experience the left figure as lying on a bed as viewed from above, and the right figure as sitting on the bed edge as viewed from a parallel angle. As the artist, I experience those impressions because I know I intended them. I expect other viewers may experience different diegetic content. Is the left figure, for example, falling? If so, my diegetic “bed” doesn’t exist in the interior white space.

I think that level of ambiguity keeps the interior white a discursive white.

What happens when there are no frame lines?

I suspect the same ambiguity remains, only now there’s no gutter. Even though the discursive white of the previous gutter was unambiguous (no viewer interpretation turned it into a representation of something other than of nothingness), merging its area with the areas directly surrounding the figures doesn’t feel that different to me.

I think that’s because I experience all three as discursive white. So there’s no diegetic-discursive tension at an unspecified edge as in the second example:

Tension occurs across the diegetic-discursive divide, not between areas of discursive white.

I think that’s because areas of discursive white aren’t differentiated. They’re just the unmarked page. But areas of diegetic white vary significantly. Notice how in the third example the white areas of the face are different from the white areas in the hair which are different from the white areas in the clothing:

I experience the white area in the hair above the figure’s right eye as “brighter” than the white of the skin, which I experience as “brighter” than the white in the clothing. Those effects are created discursively by the shapes and nearness of the surrounding black marks, but the effects are also influenced by the deigetic content: that area of hair appears “brighter” because of how it catches the light.

All three diegetic whites are also simultaneously the same discursive white — there’s no diegesis without a discourse. But when viewed, the areas of discursive white are experienced as representing different things, producing a range of different diegetic whites.

(If I write a second edition of The Comics Form, maybe this will grow into a new subsection.)

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