What I Use To Draw (Inking)

My main inking tools, first photo, from bottom-to-top:

Tombow WS-BH Black brush pen, hard tip (blue case) - Provides a thin, steady line. My main go-to for simple line work and many details.

Tombow WS-BS Black brush pen, soft tip (green case) - Provides a supple, variable line. A "brushier" line. I do most of my inking with this and the Tombow hard tip. I'll build up over thinner hard tip lines or just go in with this for a line with more life to it. You can vary the line weight in one pass by applying more or less pressure on the paper. Like using an actual brush.

Pitt Brush Artist Pen - I got hooked on these while working on the art for the Super Martian Robot Girl shorts for Yo Gabba Gabba!. I was just starting to work with brush pens rather than dip pens, and needed a good, thick line for art that would be used by the animators. I use them if I want to go thicker than the Tombow soft tip, and sometimes to ink in black areas on small drawings or if I'm using paper that wouldn't take actual ink well.

Pigma Microns - I buy the packs with a range of line weights from .005 to .08 and use these for ruling straight lines, detail work, thickening lines and fixing incomplete lines. Sometimes I use these for lettering. The .005 and .01 get the most use, for crosshatching and texturing. I need to try their brush pens out to see how they look.

Koh-I-Noor Rapidographs - Technical pens with refillable ink. Growing up a school friend showed me his rapidographs and they became my go-to for a while because they provided steady, dependable, dark lines. I was -- and still am, to a large degree -- not confident in my inking so rapidographs were a way to have more control over my linework than with a nib or brush. I would thicken lines by changing pens and/or building up lines with additional strokes. I use them less than I used to but still will pick them up for detail work and fixes, and the #2 and #3 pens are still my main go-to for lettering.

Inks (picture 3) - I've never been super-knowledgeable about art supplies, especially ink. I can't really remember what I used to use, but ink, like paper, pen nibs, brushes and many art supplies (and most other things) have steadily become worse over the course of my lifetime. I constantly see artists complaining about the quality of the watercolor paper they use, the way ink bleeds on modern Bristol board (I can attest to this one), the brushes, the Hunt 102 pen nib (ditto), etc. Some things you can buy in vintage lots off eBay, but ink deteriorates. I tried some inks a ways back based on recommendations I found online, and found I liked FW Acrylic Artists Ink. I also have a little jar of Deleter India Ink that came with a selection of Japanese pen nibs, and I like it quite a bit. I don't use as much ink as I used to, so a small bottle of FW lasts me a while. I bought an 8-oz bottle of Koh-I-Noor Rapidograph ink some years ago and still have quite a bit left.

Toothbrush - For splatter effects and textures. A little ink on the bristles, run your thumb over it and watch the ink splatter. Takes some practice to test the amount of pressure vs the effect it gets. Sometimes you'll need to mask off the parts of the art you don't want splattered, but if you get good at it you can usually finesses it and clean up the few stray dots that escaped the applied area.

Q-Tip - I use these to cover large black areas . Dip it in the ink and "paint" with the cotton swab. Wheee! Saves time. Unless you fill blacks in digitally. I like to do as much as is possible and feasible on a page by hand. And I kind of enjoy filling in black areas. Also, I don't use computers well enough to do more than some basic fixes in Photoshop (erasing, fixing lines). I usually swipe the Q-tip around as close to the edges of lines and panel borders as possible, then go in with a thick rapidograph to get the edges finishes.

Remember - when it comes to art supplies, the best tool for the job is the one that helps you get the results you want. Try out what you can get access to, decide on what you're happiest and most comfortable with. If you're working for print, the way the lines will reproduce matter more than how they look on the page. Of course, a lot of you are working digitally, and when it comes to that, I can't offer a lick of advice. I can scan my pages, play with the levels, erase some dirt and stray lines and try to complete a missing or tapering line, and that's about it.

Coming up: Inking corrections, what I used to ink with, and some other stuff.