I was having lots of fun working with my Ackerman pen and its flexible Manga G-nib. Suddenly I could reproduce the thick-thin lines I’ve seen in comics I like (and if others are doing it, I should be doing it, too, right?).
Strategic Coach are asking me to do a lot of illustration for them — equal to the amount of writing I’m doing, which is a) giving me lots of good practice, and b) has allowed me to change my “What do you do?” answer to “writer and illustrator”, which feels awesome.
But the Ackerman pen leaks like crazy, and I’m using deadly black ink. (There’s a table at the pub with a new permanent stain for folks to remember me by — oops!) And then the other day I was doing a full-page drawing for a (very fun, as-yet-secret) book project, and I don’t know if it was the amount of coffee I’d had to drink or what, but suddenly the G-nib lines felt huge and out of control, like I’d become a mash-up of Charles Schultz and Katherine Hepburn. I switched back to my “old” method (like, months old), and suddenly felt comfortable and preferred the look of what I was doing — it wasn’t so much an obvious pen-line as just a finished shape.
G-nib on the left, Carbon pen lines & Tombow nib outline on the right.
(At this point, I’m wondering why you would persist in reading about my struggles with pens and paper. Thank you.)
Yesterday on my lunch break, I drove the car to the grocery store — just because I could, YAY!! — and then I started re-watching the documentary Cartoon College. Having just survived driving lessons, I would hardly want to be in a gruelling, deadline-filled MFA course, but seeing the people there, all exchanging ideas and best practices about drawing, I did feel a longing. I’m trying to find the right paper, the right pen, and to work out all these technical and stylistic skills — all from first principles. That’s difficult.
Yet totally fun. I wrote an article this morning then drew the illustration to go with it. How fun is that? What a blessing, to get to spend my days like this.
I’d still like to be able to do more work directly on-screen, so here’s me practising in a spare moment today with my stylus. (I don’t even like cats, but for some reason I like to experiment with them — so maybe that makes sense after all.)
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