Making Art

[bcholmes]

I've had this conversation a few times, lately, so I thought I'd talk about my art tools.

Here's what my drawing table looks like in my office. It's a standard drawing table with a Borco on the top.

I use dip pens for all my inking. The three main nibs I use are these ones: a small crowquill nib for almost detail work, a "mapping point" nib which I use to draw the boxes around the panels and text boxes, and a B-6 lettering nib for all my lettering.

I'm completely sold on the idea that you need to get a good quality India ink to do any inking. I didn't understand how important this was until the first time I used Dr. Ph. Martin's after using an inferior ink for so long.

The only complaint I have about Martin's ink is that I find that the opening on the top is too narrow; I can't see the ink when I'm dipping a pen in. For that reason, I bought another brand of ink with a wider opening and threw away the ink, filling it, instead, from my Martin's jars.

In addition to using pens, I also use some brushes. I'm not really good at detailing with brushes, so I just use the brushes to fill in solid areas of black. My most commonly-used brushes are a 1/4" flat and a number 2 round. These ones are at the end of their life: India ink is apparently hard on paint brushes.

I should also mention that a good eraser brush is essential. While I was taking a watercolour course, I really saw in action that thing that my profs always warned me about: the more you touch the paper, the more oils will affect the paper. Better to use a brush to get rid of eraser fluff.

Finally, this brush cleaner stuff helps me keep the brushes clean.

I regularly use rulers. I have a relatively long 18" metal ruler with a cork underside (you need to keep the edge of the ruler from touching the spot where the pen hits the paper, or the ruler will cause the ink to bleed under the ruler. The cork helps hold the ruler up a little bit.) I mostly use the 18" to measure out panels and whatnot, as well as to guide the mapping point when I'm inking the panel borders.

Most smaller line work I do with a small little 6" ruler (also with a cork underside).

Also I use a lettering guide to quickly do lines for lettering. It's faster than measuring out the lines.

One last item: paper. Apparently a big part of good art is good materials. I usually ink on one of two types of paper: I prefer Windsor and Newton Cotman-series cold-pressed watercolour paper. I like the way the watercolour paper takes the ink. I have a number of pads of 12" by 16", which is a bit small for the 10" by 15" scale I usually draw comic pages on.

I get the impression that I'm supposed to prefer the Bainbridge 80 cold-pressed illustration board. And it's a good runner up (I especially like that it's easy to get nice big pieces of it -- 15" by 20" is pretty standard). But I feel like I get a bit of resistance to the ink (and to the pen). But I still prefer the watercolour paper.

Another factor is that it's easier to fit the watercolour pad in my backpack, whereas the illustration board is too big. So if I'm taking it to class, the watercolour paper is much more attractive.

Comments

[aquaeri]

That was more interesting than I expected. I remember that metal-ruler problem with a boring ball-point pen; the cork lifter makes sense.