Dip Pen/Calligraphy Pen

 

Dip pens and fountain pens are a tool I was wholly unfamiliar with using, but after watching some comics and manga artists use them for inking, I had the urge to try it myself. I know the G-Pen is the popular manga inker, and was what I initially looked for, but figuring I wouldn't do this very often, I just bought the cheapest pen/ink bottle set I found, which was a basic calligraphy set. I'm not sure what size rating it actually is, but I figured it was close enough.

It is a very tricky tool to use. Not only do you have to constantly be careful not to spill or dribble unwanted ink, the very structure of the nibs mean you have to really take into account the position and pressures applied onto the paper, as well as the type of you paper you are using. Unlike ballpoint, the needle-sharp tip will dig into the paper, so you have to draw in more of a "dragging" motion, as a pushing motion will cause the tip to bury into the paper. You can also end up "stuttering" the tip across the page, causing splatter and line breaks if the tip catches at a certain angle.

You have to be very mindful of pressure, not only to not damage the paper or the tip, but to try and control the line width. Except, very often, the ink's viscosity can also work against you, causing a line to simply not appear, or for the ink to suddenly blob out thicker than intended. Depending on the paper used, fine fibers of paper can also get stuck on the tip, and suddenly, lines are coming out thicker like from a brush as a little wet ball gets formed on the tip. I suppose you could use this to your advantage if you knew what you were doing, but I doubt its a recommended technique. Overall, you need to keep your tools clean and in proper shape, and make sure your ink is flowing properly. And there are also different sizes and shapes of nibs, which I didn't try, so that may also change things.

I'm sure it also helps if you already know how to draw, and do things like hatch-shading and variable-line shading, which I obviously am still shit at. And, of course, there's no undo button or zooming features with pen and paper. Nonetheless, it's been a fun exercise to try! Messy as it can be, there is a certain extra layer of zen to using analogue tools, and the fountain pen in particular feels like you are gently carving the image out of the paper.

While I still want to stick mainly to digital art, I kind of want to also try inking with a brush, and even doing watercolor, which I can never seem to find a truly good match for in digital.

Sketch on Sketch

I've mentioned it before, but a technique I like to occasionally do with digital is to use a color brush and just slop down a big spread of paint or pencil dusting or whichever, then go back and use an eraser tool to "carve" the design into it, keeping it on the same layer. In this case, I actually just ended up using a white pencil line over a black tilted pencil spread. The effect is the same, really. The challenge here is that, while I am using digital and I can still use the undo button, this is a lot less forgiving of a technique for immediate fixes. It's harder to go back and do any touch-up work without making obvious screw ups with the texturing, and resizing/repositioning just messes things up even further.

So unless you're willing to undo a bunch of otherwise good lines to try and fix one messed up line you don't catch until later (and it's easy to end up exceeding your undo limit depending on the program anyway), you're stuck with the mistakes you make, almost like using actual pen on paper. Obviously, you could still touch things up if you really wanted to with delicate patchwork, but you're usually still making the patch-up more of a hassle than is worth it for a sketch.

In any case, I also think it makes for a striking visual style, as well as a neat little challenge to myself.

Greenie

 

Sustra and Dogoro again

 

Young Woman Sketch

 

Actually used a photo reference for this one. I wasn't sure about the shadow, so I went back to touch it up, and I can't tell which actually looks better, so here's both.

Rabbits and Dresses Again

Love drawing these goofballs!

More Sketches