What I Used To Use To Draw (And Some Stuff About Inking)

I didn't have anyone to ask about art supplies when I was a kid, and information was hard to come by about the subject. You could buy How To art books (if you could afford them) but there was precious little information available about what cartoonists and comic artists used. I didn't even know comic book art was drawn at larger sizes than they appeared in print, so for a few years all the kid comics I made were comic-sized. This might be another reason my art gravitated towards filling up every inch of space with detail. I didn't find out about certain art supplies until I attended an afterschool/summer animation program at SVA. I learned about rapidographs from a high school classmate named Ralph Cordero (who was an artist and sculptor and I'm 99% positive he's the same Ralph Cordero who did makeup and effects work on COMBAT SHOCK, THE TOXIC AVENGER, THE SUCKLING and FLESH-EATING MOTHERS among other films).

The first tool I ever used to "ink" with was a black Bic writing pen. Eventually I found a cheap art set in Woolworth's which came with a small bottle of ink and a short plastic blue nib holder with a nib inserted. I don't know if I ever knew the type of nib point it was. It was the only tool I used for quite a while until I discovered rapidographs and ponied up for a #2 pen. Technical pens felt more like the ballpoint pen and I liked the contact with the paper.

I read somewhere about how practically every professional inker used a Winsor Newton #7. Eventually the #7 brush became a holy frail, spoken of like some sort of holy weapon of legend. I couldn't afford one, and the crappy brushes I could afford were a bad fit. I was just never good at inking with a brush, I tried so I could feel like a "real artist" using "real tools" but I sucked at it. I needed to feel the contact with the page just like with a pencil, and I pressed down too hard holding a brush, especially on details. My hand never meshed with a brush, whether attempting to ink a drawing or paint a Grenadier D&D miniature.

I went back to dip pens at some point and that became my weapon of choice. I was not a good inker. On my own work my lines were scratchy, hesitant and rough. I never really learned the fundamentals, I just kept using the pen and slowly got better at it, largely because my penciling improved. But it was a different industry and there were lots of small publishers and opportunities, and after I landed Pirate Corp$! at Eternity Comics I found myself writing, penciling and inking my own comics, basically practicing in public. The pages got better over time, I started losing some bad and lazy habits, and I started doing tighter pencils in order to guide the inks more. My inking didn't get halfway decent until I was in my 30s, but even now I'm not anyone who would be hired as an inker over anyone else's pencils. My inking works for my cartooning, and I still can't draw a decent image directly in ink. I only tried out for one professional inking job in my career, Diana Schutz asked me to do a tryout page for a Grendel series back in the late 80s. I'd never inked over anyone else's pencils and had never worked on transparent vellum before (laid over an 11" x 18" xerox copy of the pencils). I ached it and did my best but it was stiff and uncertain work. Without a solid pencil line I was lost, and my lines were stiff. Not professional quality.

The nib I used primarily was the Hunt 102. That was my weapon of choice, as I put it. I added in the Hunt 22 some time later. When the quality of Hunt 102s started degrading I began buying vintage nibs off eBay. You can see the remains of a vintage box of mid-century nibs are in the upper left-hand in the photo above.

In the mid-2000s was when I started using brush pens, for expediency and control. I love dip pens but they are slower to work with (Frank Miller once told me using a nib was like inking with an X-ACTO knife) and you have to wait for the ink to dry. I've smeared many a page in my time.

A while back I picked up some Deleter pens and nibs. I really liked using the G-nib.

I'm happier with my inking nowadays, I don't know exactly what I'm doing but it ends up fairly attractive and reader's can follow what's going on across a page and it can be scanned and printed, so it does the job. I have a style people like enough to get me work and to sell originals. I am not very good at inking many things, fabric folds theories, hair and clothes, anatomy -- those are also weakness I have in my pencils but I can fake it better with a pencil. There are effects I've never practiced enough, feathering and the like, but I approximate them and do something along those lines, no pun intended. These days I'm pretty happy with how things come out. I take a lot more time inking nowadays, I have to go slow and steady and it's frustrating but I make fewer mistakes (on the whole).

Brush pens help a lot when it comes to expediency and wear and tear on my hand and arm, but if I ever catch up on my work, I really, really want to pull the pens and nibs out and do some inking with them again. I loved the feel of the pen point gliding on paper. I liked the line you could get, and the way the ink looked on the page. There's just something about pen and ink I really love. Part of me is worried I can't work with dip pens anymore, that I won't be able to lay lines down the way I want or the way I used to. But it would still be fun to just fool around with them again. The smell of ink is still intoxicating to me.