#0003: Cat Tools, Part 1 - What I Use, What I Use ‘Em For, And Why I Stubbornly Stick With ‘Em

Who Even Draws Without A Computer Anymore?

Answer: me, apparently.

This may be mildly surprising to some of you¹, but the vast majority of professional illustrators working today do not use traditional media. I’m the odd one out.

The reason for why I stick with pen and bristol isn’t as ideological as one would think, given how much of a Luddite I tend to be. No, I just grew up without computers for the most part, and the years that most of my peers would have spent learning how graphic tablets work in Blender I spent barely able to make rent. So I used what was cheapest and I used what I had, and for the most part that boiled down to cheap brush pens and graph notebook paper.²

These days, my methods are (slightly) more sophisticated, but I still for the life of me cannot seem to grok modern digital art. Nearly everything I do is drawn by hand, all the lettering is either done by hand or by one of my typewriters, and I continue to be a massive curmudgeon about the modern world and its consequences for the illustrative arts.

This is going to be the first entry of a few where I expand a bit upon the “What does Piper use in her work?” question on my website, and talk about why I use the specific inks, pens, and such that I tend to use. Who knows–maybe I’ll convince you to pick up a set and a sketchbook, too.

Inks

Speedball Superblack

The GOAT. No question. Goes down smooth and clean like gasoline. Matte finish, flows well on a brush, cheap as dirt, and gets bone-dry quicker than a cattle skull in Death Valley. You cannot go wrong with this ink.

Kuretake Comic White 30

If you fuck up, you need a way to fix it. Hell, sometimes you fuck up on purpose just to draw on top of it. Lord knows I do.

While Kuretake Comic White has its flaws–it tends to bleed blue if painted over black ink, and it does tend to dry out remarkably fast–the texture it dries to almost makes up for it. Matte, textured enough to pass for vellum, and relatively smooth. Brushes glide over it, brush pens work fine on top of it, and if you know your way around a drawing board you know why those two details are as valuable as they are. It’s almost impossible to find a more practically functional white ink, and this is one of the best I’ve found.

Brushes

Princeton Aqua Elite Brush Round 1

In years past, I’d either recommend a Pentel Pocket Brush, mention that I just use “whatever round I happen to have on hand at the time” if I need to cover a larger area and don’t want to waste ink cartridges, and call it a day.

With that stated, I’ve been using Princeton Aqua Elites in size 1 for about a year now, and they do exactly what I want and need them to do–springy, simple lines, at a fraction of the cost of Kolinsky sable. Plus, unlike the Pentel Pocket Brush, I don’t have constant bleed problems in warmer temperatures if I store the brush sideways (or upside down in a case in one of my bags, for that matter). Highly recommend–if you can find them in stock, that is.

Whichever Flat Brush Happens To Be Clean At The Time

….Okay, yeah, “whatever brush I happen to have on hand” still very much applies for most larger black-out jobs. Most of the time I use flats in sizes 2 or 4. Same brushes I use for pot glue as well, mind³. Clean ’em out enough, and you probably won’t have too many issues with discoloration. I don’t, at least.

Why No Dip Pens?

I have a heavy hand and tend to dig into the paper by accident. Simple as.

You may think that seems a bit at odds with my insistence upon using brushes to lay down lines. Fact of the matter is, if I start digging in with a brush I can IMMEDIATELY see that I’m doing it. Brush goes into the bristol, your line gets real thick real quick, and you’ve got yourself hard visual evidence in less than a fraction of a second that you’ve fucked yourself royal.

What’s more, if you happen to do exactly that (in my case, usually due to hand tremors or nerves or something), you aren’t scraping up the bristol. Dip pens don’t have as much visual feedback, but they do very much have tactile feedback from you tearing into the board. There’s none of that with brushes, but there’s also not a small crack in the paper or a rip in the plate finish that you have to now contend with. Just hit it with some Kuretake Comic White and you’re rolling.

Markers, Brush Pens, And Such

Deleter Neopiko Line 3 Pen, 2.0 mm

The Neopiko is my dedicated “ruling out borders” marker. It does one thing and one thing well: make consistent 2mm thick lines. I use it to draw panel borders, which I often want to be around 2mm thick⁴. Simple as.

Zebra Disposable Brush Pen, Extra Fine

If there was one tool I had to pick an unlimited supply of in exchange for it being the only one I use the rest of my career, I’d have a solid case for this workhorse being the pick. I tend to buy these things by the box, and it’s not uncommon for an entire “free shipping” limit to be hit with just me placing a refill order for these lil’ guys.

I use this for all the hand-lettering I do, nearly all of the hatching (especially if I’m trying to get a faux-dip-pen look going, which I often do), most exploratory lines and sketches…hell, I more often than not sign my checks with this thing.

If you take one rec away from this article, make it this one.

Micron 05 / Pentel Stylo

These are my “layin’ down hatching” weapons of choice. I tend to reach for the Micron more than I do the Stylo these days, half because if you feather your touch enough they’re functionally the same thing (although the Stylo does hit that aforementioned faux-dip-pen look I tend to prize a bit more consistently) and half because Jetpens doesn’t carry the Stylo and I don’t put in orders to Blick often enough outside of “I am buying a year’s supply of canvases and paints in one go” types of occasions.

Uni-ball Signo White gel pens

Never play an ace when a two will do. I use these for when I can’t justify pulling out the bottle of Kuretake to fix a minor fuck-up. They’re admittedly not very reliable, but if you can work around their ahem idiosyncratic crankiness, they’re useful for a lot of quick fixes.

Pencilling

..Honestly, Whatever The Fuck I Have Lying Around

Not a joke, I’m afraid. I tend to favor 2mm lead holders for detail work these days, simply because I can sharpen them like I do other pencils (see below), and for general sketching I do enjoy General’s flat sketching pencil in 2B, but the reality is that 99% of the time I just grab whatever’s closest to me on the side of the drawing board.

In my travel kit, I keep a Uni Mitsubishi 2mm lead holder, a mechanical pencil of some kind, and some lead refills, along with a Sumo Grip.

A Knife

Also not a joke. You wanna know why all my pencils look like hypodermics? It’s because I sharpen ’em with a knife like God herself intended.

I’d toss a video here that shows you about how I do it, but none of the videos I’ve found seem to whittle the lead down to the absurd degree that I do, and seeing as I have a face made for radio I’m not going to be making one. This one’s the closest reference point to how I do it⁵–although I tend to push that point far past where this gentleman does, as you can see from the photo to the right there.

Something I absolutely will advise that you do is that you keep your knife sharp. This is knowledge half gained from my time in professional kitchens and half from the illustration grind, but a dull knife is far more likely to cut you than a sharp one. Get yourself a cheater and keep that puppy ground to a fine one. You’ll thank me for it if you do, and you’ll eventually curse yourself for it if you don’t.

That’s about it for the basic mark-making materials I use. One of my resolutions when re-starting the blog is that I want to keep articles short and sweet, so I’m breaking this up into multiple parts. Next time, I’ll talk about papers I prefer, why I prefer ’em, and some other things along those lines.

Thanks for reading, friends. Stay safe out there.

–piper <3

Footnotes…