Saturday, April 17, 2010

Brush or Pen? Both!

One of the really interesting things at the recent conventions here was the tools the artists were using. 3 of them (Agnes Garbowska, Mike Allred, and Francis Manapul) were using the same ink pen, and I'd never seen it before.

It's a nifty little cross between a brush and a pen, using bristles but running off an ink cartridge. Which of course means you can do everything from detail to thick lines, and vary the weight of a line like you can with a brush, but without the hassle (and mess) of dipping from an ink well.

I wasn't the only one taken with this. The 3 of them combined could probably have sold a couple of dozen of the things, with the number of people asking them what it was they were using. Mike Allred put me on to the above Jetpens website, so I quickly put in an order (side note: don't visit "jetpen.com" by mistake, it is... disturbing). They arrived a couple of days ago (can't get them locally), so today I had a bit of a play, doing this in around 30 minutes:

It's really cool not having to change pens, or to fill in a think line using a thin tip. If your hand's not steady doing the thin lines then it really shows, had the shakes a few times. Doesn't seem like it will take a heck of a lot of practise to get used to though, the above came out pretty good for a first attempt.

3 comments:

Jon said...

Ha awesome. Make a post about a pen made in china, get chinese porn spam (thanks Google translator). That's pretty random.

Arif Ammar said...

فنکار ہر حال میں صرف اپنے کام کے معیار کو برقرار رکھنے کی کوشش کرتا ہے ۔

The Irredeemable Shag said...

Jon - Nice drawing! The pen sounds nifty too!

Finally, nice SPAM! I'm jealous. :)

The Irredeemable Shag
http://firestormfan.com