Multi-media multimedia

Above, a minute-long video showing a few of the good ol' tools in action.

For most of the line art, my Zebra brush pens are proving pleasant. They're more rigid than the Sakura Pigma brush pens, though, and I'm not sure I am getting used to that. The Pigma might be a better fit for me. (At least in Canada, you can order Zebra pens directly from Zebra. Mine were cheap to ship and fast to arrive.)

For blocking in things like DD's vest, and when I want thick lines with a little natural wobble, I'm using a Pentel brush pen. Like a real brush, it requires discipline and practice, but uh hmm whatever, I'll keep using it anyway.

For some elements, I use black watercolour paint (old Windsor Newton Cotman watercolours, in this case) and a Pentel watercolour pen. For things like the whatchamacallit that wraps around the mast, painting it in a contour-line style gives me texture and variation for free.

And then there's the Posca white ink marker. Honestly, if I didn't have something like this to be able to draw white back into and over the darks, I don't think I'd be using ink. I remember in Grade 8, I had a great art teacher who brought in an original page from a Dark Horse ALIENS comic. It was full-colour watercolour art, and was probably excellent, but the only thing I remember about it was the shock of seeing that the artist had used WHITE-OUT. On PROFESSIONAL ARTWORK. You could see it in thick, bright blobs, and I suppose it was probably a high-quality white paint or correction fluid. Thinking back now, I don't know why that would have been astonishing to me, but them's the facts: it blew my tiny mind. "Real" artists are allowed to use white-out. Perhaps it was the epiphany that you could use a technique like that in the artwork, but on the printed page it would not show up. At any rate, let's say it was "formative."