Pencils are everything

My mother dislocated her hip! I went to Florida to help with her recuperation. Today was the first day in a few months that I had some time to draw. I think I dislocated my ability to draw. But with practice hopefully both my mom and I will be up and running again soon.

I love Florida. Hopefully I’ll get to post more comics about my time there before several months pass by.

With the new year, I’m back working at @sawcomics. Sometimes Tom at SAW asks me to write some thoughts about the Year Long Program’s weekly lesson and this week is about pencils. If you are interested in hearing my thoughts about pencils, please continue reading below.

PENCILS ARE EVERYTHING! 

My take on pencils.

As a young art student, one of my first drawing teachers encouraged us to never erase. He said that the smears and the experimental, exploratory lines that one makes as they figure out their subject add depth and character to a drawing, much like the wrinkles on a face of a person getting old. Hearing this at 13 did not really land, but luckily I remembered it going forward. 

When I got into making comics, drawing with ink and a brush was “in.” You needed a Winsor & Newton Series 7 sable brush. If it had been a law that I needed to draw with a brush, I’d quit art, convinced I could not draw. (Certainly that I could not letter.)

I decided to ignore the ink thing until I learned more. I also ignored panels and writing! It ended up working because it opened up possibilities for me to make my own way.

Even after receiving good feedback precisely for making my own way, I still thought that for paying work, or work that people who don’t care about indie comics could read, I needed to at least ink with a nib pen, and make panels, and not figure out my story as I went along, and a bunch of other stuff. (You do need to be coherent to make commercial work, unfortunately.)

Similar to how I did not know how to make comics, I also did not know a lot about prepping for print, or a lot of other technical precision techniques to make work look great. Some people use a light box to ink over pencils, so there are no smudges. Some people color on a different layer than their inks and process them differently so that the “blacks are really black” and are not compromised by the color processing. All of that really got in the way of me getting stuff done, because I had no idea how to do it. So I just incorporated my own sort of natural sloppiness into my creative intention and hoped for the best. Printing wasn’t perfect, and so much got lost, I figured nothing would ever look as good as originals anyways, so why get hung up?

But after a while I felt like my REAL LINE was erased by my inks and it was too much compromise! I think I am not particularly adept with ink, but I also blame it for just not being as cool as pencil. Maybe it’s not either of us—I just don’t like the fit.

Several years ago I got an assignment doing a comic every month and the deadline was brutal, so I abandoned the inks but kept the water coloring so it didn’t look entirely tossed off. This is when I decided to quit inks forever. 

Around the same time, I started drawing big single images. They were mural-size, so I had to scale up my line to something thicker. It took a while but I settled on condensed charcoal, which is kind of like ink and a pencil had a baby—it’s super black, but dry and malleable. It is hard to erase, though, and the easiest way to get rid of a mark made with it is to use a chamois cloth. But it leaves BIG smudges. Which are BEAUTIFUL. 

After having a baby, descending into the pandemic, and realizing that a postpartum freelance illustration career was pretty much a luxury item I could no longer afford, I got an iPad to explore Procreate and see if it might make my art practice a bit more accessible. As most everyone here knows, Procreate comes with a bazillion “brushes,” many of which emulate all types of pencils, and you can import new ones and change them and there are infinite options. Not one of them works for me. Not a single one! I see great work here at SAW and by other artists using Procreate, but for pencils it’s just another thing keeping me and my Real Line from each other. If they passed a law saying I needed to draw with Procreate, I would quit art, convinced I could not draw.

I did a piece where I decided to “ink” with pencils—specifically a thicker, soft pencil like a 1.3 2B lead. I did light pencils to figure out my drawing, and then penciled again on top of those pencils! This involved some erasing and some keeping of the sketchier lines, but I liked it. And then I colored in Procreate! It was fun. Some people complained about my digital watercolors but I told them to get a life.

I think I will often be trying different media to suit whatever circumstances in which I’m making art, but I have learned that I need to keep my access to my Real Line no matter what. And usually that means keeping my pencils! 😤