Pens and Nibs

[Jkandra]

What are you using for inking? Are you traditional or digital?

I've been doing my web comic for six month now and I'm still searching for the best pen/nib setup. Years ago I used a sketching fountain pen and found it gave me a good versatile line with no catching and spattering on the page. I can't find anything like that now and I don't want to become dependent upon something that might be discontinued so I've been using the trusty old crow quill. While I feel I'm starting to get the hang of that nib, I'd still like to try others. What do you use, if you use dip pens? Has anybody tried the Japanese Manga pens such as the Deleter line? How do they compare to traditional western equipment? Are there others out there? I get the feeling that manual materials availability has suffered a lot from computer use.

Thanks.

Joe K.
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[Swikan]

Joe. I am trying to go all digital myself, but I am not quite getting the hang of it.

My pen and paper version, tho, is inked using the old Faber-Castell PITT artist pen. It's a felt-tip brush pen and can be found at almost any art store. I really like the brush end of the Staedtler Mars Graphic 3000 Duo, too.

As I am an impatient dipper and inker, the brush pen was the answer for me. It is preloaded with india ink and disposable. (and it is easy to transport, so I can do my comic curled up on the couch under a blanket.. which will be important in the coming months! HAHAHAH!)

[Phact0rri]

I ink with pens, a brand called "zig" they last a really long time and they come with sets with diffrent sizes, which helps in adjusting the line weight. though when I scan in, I always scan in black and white and convert the line art to vector.

[Jkandra]

Hey Swikan!

I experimented with computer creation as well, (I've been doing computer graphics for over 20 years) but I found that I have better control and get better and more consistent results from pen and ink. I scan in as line art and do clean up and copy and paste with Photoshop, so I'm not a Luddite. I'm assuming you use a Wacom for your computer work.

PS. Thanks for all the good words on my Tab Board!

[Dracomax]

call me a philistine, but right now I'm just using cheap gel-pens to ink.

I'm planning on switching to non ballpoint-ish pens soon, but money is tight, and I don't get to have dedicated comicking pens just yet.

I did try inking in photoshop, but the pens gave me much smoother and more easily controlled lines, as well as taking less time to ink.

[Mercury Hat]

Staedtler brands for sketches. Regular pens, no line variation. They're like Microns, but I think they hold up better. Ink is really more of a dark, dark grey, but you probably wouldn't ever notice.

Rapidographs for comics or straight lines on illustrations. Expensive technical pens, you refill them with a dropper of ink. No line variation. Since it's real ink, the lines are a lot darker and richer than you'd get from a disposable technical pen like Microns or Staedtlers.

Brush pen for large areas of black. Made by Micron, the ink is archival. The tips are easy to fray and destroy, so I don't even try inking with them.

Dip pens with a regular nib like yours for illustrationsI plan on ink washing or attempting to marker-color. The faces and fine details are usually done with a Rapidograph pen so I don't mess up.

If you have a steady hand for it, you'd get the best line variation with a brush. Dip pens get you second best.

Tools all depend on what you're looking for as far as line style, ink type, and so on. I got Rapidographs, for example, because I wanted a pen which used real, rich ink.

[KODAMA]

Has anybody tried the Japanese Manga pens such as the Deleter line? How do they compare to traditional western equipment? Are there others out there?

Hmm.. when I go nib shopping...
o_O It is not too often I can find the nib I really like.
The kind I like are usually called "spoon nib," but the american ones seem pretty blunt for extremely fine work (such as really detailed hair or landscapes). I usually end up sharpening them using a piece of ceramic (usually on an underside of a bowl -- something that isn't glazed)

I measure the nib by poking my index finger with the nib.... XD if it's not needle sharp, then it needs to be grinded down into a point. But this is only for the hair and eyes nib.. the nib I use for outlining the skin or the nib I use to draw the background [although.. this is pretty thin too] are slightly thicker and do not require any sharpening.

I had purchased a strange straw-shaped nib a while back, but the nib was too flexible. o_o;; Compared to them, spoon nibs are strong and hold a lot of ink..

[TheSuburbanLetdown]

Hunt 107 hawk quill
Hunt 102 Crow quill
Winsor & Newton Series 7 brush size 2
Koh-I-Noor Radiograph for lettering

I hear from a reliable source that Japanese nibs are smoother because they're made of better steel.

Faber Castell makes a better brush pen than the Micron. I don't like the line qualty of brush pens vs actual brushes, but they're handy when sketching on the go.

[Phalanx]

I use chinese calligraphy brushes. They hold tons of ink compared to watercolour brushes, taper to a fine point and are cheap and easily replacable.

The downside is that the bristles are very soft, you need a rather delicate touch to handle them.

[Ataraxia]

For my two most recent stories (Western University and Voles of the Dusk) I've used a variety of illustration pens: Faber-Castell PITTs, Edding 1800s, and Deleter Neopicos. <b>Swikan</b>, neat that we use the same kind of pen. Well, I guess not really, but anyhow...

The Deleter pens are slightly more expensive than the PITTs, but they give crisper lines. My father is a graphic designer and he always used tech pens for illustration. With these pens I can use some of the techniques I learned from him, but don't have to bother with the mess and inconvenience of tech pens. The one problem is that the pens aren't refillable.

For Lucy and Bing Go North, I used a combination of illustration pens and Chinese calligraphy brushes. The calligraphy brushes are nice, and over here they're really cheap. The one problem is that I haven't found a good drawing ink in Korea, so I got my sister to send me some from Canada.

My earlier comics were mostly drawn using crowquill nibs. They're very nice too. My absolute earliest comics (AT ep 1, all stories but Martyr W/O A Cause) were drawn using tech pens but I didn't like those much. My nibs were constantly getting clogged; this may have been because I didn't take care of my pens well at the time.

Recently I bought a WACOM drawing tablet. So far I just use it for editing my comics after they've been scanned into the computer, but I hope to be able to ink them with it after I get a bit more practice.

[NotQuiteInsane]

Depending on what I'm doing, what's nearest me and how I'm feeling, one of the following:
- Rotring Isograph (basically a Rapidograph with a refillable ink cartridge), 0.25mm typically, 0.35 for shading, 0.15 for fine detail (that almost never survives scanning anyway, but natch).
- Staedtler Pigment Liners, 0.25, 0.35 or 0.5. Mine have a tendency of drying out if left for any length of time, no matter if they're capped or uncapped.
- Ballpoint pen. Don't laugh, it works.
- Pentel Techniclick-G 0.5mm mechanical pencil (if I can't be bothered inking at all)

I've been meaning to play with my Wacom tablet a bit, but I've lost the power supply...

[Garneta]

I usually use Faber Castel PITT pens, but I must be the odd one out, as I don't like the brush one as well as most others on here.

I also use Millennium pens, and I have a dip pen but don't use it all too often (I might use it a bit more if I knew where my ink was!)

[Doublemint]

I go mostly digital now, but not too long ago I was committed to using a dip pen. The results were somewhat unsatisfactory.

http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f108/ ... igital.png

The image on top is a the first and only comic I ever completed using a dip pen. I had only been using it for a month at that point (the top strip was done in early March) so I wasn't too hot with it. I really didn't know how to handle it, and my inexperience shows. It was hard enough drawing, let alone with an unfamiliar instrument. The second strip is a late-June remake of the one above. I did it entirely on my Wacom. Since then, I do most of my comic digitally. It would take me several hours to make even a three panel strip entirely on a Wacom (rough to finish), but I've shortened that considerably by sketching and inking my roughs by hand and then jumping straight to the final draft by redoing that rough in my Wacom on a seperate layer.

The only strip that I've posted that was entirely by hand is this one: http://bestandbrightest.comicgenesis.co ... 60906.html

I roughed it in blue pencil, and inked it with Micron .25mm. I then edited it in MS-Paint and Photoshop with a mouse. I really tore up my wrist doing that but at the time I didn't have an alternative. Still, I was sore for several days after.