Tools of the trade

One thing that as an artist I know for sure is that most of the time, when we are not asking to ourselves ‘How’ other people do their craft, we ask ‘what do they use’?
With this in mind I decided to give a little insight and show you what I’m using right now to bring ‘How to survive working in retail #2’ to fruition.

Now, since I moved recently most of my stuff hasn’t arrived to my house yet, so I needed to go out and find replacements. I took a few things with me thinking ahead, but in the rush I forgot a lot, namely; my rapidographs, my brushes, ink, squares and so on.
All these years I’ve been sort of looking for the perfect brush to ink with, and I must say that I haven’t found it yet. Every time that I can I buy a new one to give it a try and see if this one is ‘the chosen one’, to no avail I might add. I’ve read lots of stuff about inkers and their brushes, and I have to say that I’m not a fan of the sable ones, the tip is too long and I don’t have the control I want from it. I like shorter tips, with rounded heads, which gives me better control. I use a variety of mechanical pencils (0.5, 0.7, 0.9) with different leads. I also use rapidographs when inking details and straight lines with a ruler. My choice of India ink is the Speedball super black for the brush and the Staedler for the markers.

I recently had to buy a new rapidograph to cover for the missing ones, so I got a 0.4, but the nib keeps clogging up every time I use it, bringing my frustration up to new heights.
I’m hopping to recover all my stuff (including my table) by the time I have to start working on issue #3 (first draft of the script already done), and with that speed up the process so it can be out on time.
Let’s see what happens with the world as I keep looking for that perfect brush that seems to be harder to find than the perfect woman.


Traditional drawing stuff:
Staedler 9505, 0.5 mechanical pencil with HB leads
Pentel precision eraser
Sharpie fine point permanent marker (black)
Staedler mars matic 700 rapidograph 0.4 point
#2 Da Vinci series 1599 brush
Staedler rasoplast eraser
Pelikan India ink
Caballito premium paper (180 grams)
Strathmore 400 series Sketch book (89 grams)

Hardware/Software/Digital:
PNY optima attaché 2G flash drive
Adobe Photoshop CS2
Adobe Illustrator CS3
Nikon coolpix 5900 digital camera (5.1 megapixels)
HP pavilion dv8110 laptop with windows xp (512 MB, 80GB hard drive)
Canon pixma MP190 scanner/printer/copier