Followers of this blog will know that I’ve been preoccupied over the past months with finding tools to help me make better comics. Perhaps its just the grown-up version of my passion for school supplies, which many of my fellow cartoonists and artists seem to share.
A few of these cartoonist pals and I have just completed working our way through all of Ivan Brunetti’s Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice, posting our work on a private blog. (I highly recommend doing this to anyone who is serious about learning to make better comics.) The book is organized as a fifteen week course, with exercises to be done as homework each week. My collaborators in this project were Sarah Leavitt, Mita Mahato, and Mary Eve.
In week seven, Brunetti assigns students to make a grid, testing several different tools (brush with ink, nib pen with ink, technical pen, etc.) by making an insane number of tiny drawings with each tool. This is an invaluable exercise to learn what tool works for what purpose. Here’s my grid.
One tool each of us came to love is this pen, shown on this blog before, what we call The Perfect Pen. It’s got an amazing feel, a high performing nib, good mark predictability, and makes a great nib pen for cartoonists on the go. It’s amazing for drawing.
But I’ve also come to adore these metal-tip tech pens, mostly for lettering and box outlines.
Also now in love with brush markers, and ink wash pens. All of this is to say that in the process of learning about cartooning tools, we have found a fantastic one-stop online store for THE BEST products and service, Jet Pens. They describe their site as, “an online retailer of hart-to-find, unique Japanese pens and stationery. We also sell products from Korea, Germany, and the US.”
Having praised and friended them on Facebook, I recently became an official Jet Pens product tester! (I think this means they send me some wacky little thing and I mention them in a blog post about the product. They do say in the product insert that, “There is no requirement on a good or bad review…”)
I got my first package last week and look what I get to review!
He’s an adorable giraffe eraser. At first, not being able to read any of the packaging, I thought the whole thing was an eraser, but it turns out his head comes off and there’s an adorable little brown eraser in his neck. I only wish the hole on the bottom was large enough that he could fit on top my pencils. But perhaps that would be an indignity to the little fella. I love having him in my studio. Thanks, Jet Pens!
Also, in the tools-to-make-me-a-better-cartoonist department, special mention also must go to designer Doug GeBraad of Lovell and Whyte, who introduced me to 11×17 graph paper (Bienfang calls it gridded paper) with one inch and quarter inch boxes. It has changed my life! I’m not good with numbers and can’t make a straight line to save my life. This 11×17 paper helps me immensely in creating comic layouts. I can look at this paper and see them emerge.
Special inspiration mention must also go to Graphic Medicine guru Ian Williams, who encouraged me to buy and read Brunetti’s book when we were together in DC this winter, and Manga goddess Rinko Endo, who gave me my first nibs and desperately needs a website for her art work.
The final four weeks of Brunetti’s book are spent doing a multi-page comic. I decided to make mine in preparation for my “Drawing for Non-Draw-ers” workshop at the Toronto Comics & Medicine conference which starts next week. Here is a sneak preview of that comic.
