No surprise it's from Japan, where drawing with ink tools is still so large an industry that nibs and other inking tools are still made with quality. I have several friends who've switched to this and they just love it. One really cool thing is it accepts crowquil/mapping nibs, which have round, circular bodies like this: as well as regular nibs, which are concave troughs of metal like this: Most nib holders can only accept one or the other, and the holders for mapping nibs tend to be thin, exacerbating strain during fine work when using a tool used almost exclusively for fine work. The Tachikawa's thick body reduces wrist strain, and the rubber grip makes it easy to hold. Nibs sit securely in it, but the plastic isn't as rigid as on a Speedball holder, so you don't have to jam nibs in or strain to pry them out again.
Jetpens.com also has a fantastic selection of Japanese cartooning nibs, the best money can buy, unless you go antique hunting. (Fun fact about the two brands of Manga "G" nib: they're literally made across the street from one another. Both factories buy the same steel, mill it on the same machines, and put different brand stamps on them. They're otherwise identical, sort of like Olfa and NT blades, also made in Japan in neighboring factories using practically identical methods. NT's cutters are way better, though.) They also stock the sometimes hard to find Pentel Pocket brush refills at a not-bad-not-amazing price, and sell the brushpen itself at a pretty amazing price.
The Tachikawa is well worth the six bucks, being comfortable and well made, and would be the only nib holder you ever had to buy in your life.
This week on Comic Tools: Futzing with nibs
I'm insomniac tonight, so I'll type this sucker up now:
"Hey Matt. So possibly right under your feet all day at work are these scroll nibs, which are usually used for making filials and jazz for fancy calligraphy. Also, at the very bottom, is a thing called a music nib, used for making musical notation lines, it is made by Brause, not Mitchell, so it won't be in the kit. I got mine from scribblers in the UK after seeing them in someone else's catalogue, and I assumed they must be hackable for cartooning short cuts. Double vision, quicker hatching for bgs that must be covered in them, plaid shirts, checkerboards... the list is not gigantic, but you can get some interesting results. I'm not entirely certain that they are in NY Central, but I believe I saw mitchell caligraphy kits hanging over the doorway to the little room the G nibs are stored in, so if you see them, you could probably come up with some ingenious use for them that I am missing. I've used them for a bit of grass in the new comic already, and it was delightful to use something a little different."
She included this photo:
Indeed we do have these nibs downstairs at New York Central. If you walk straight into the store about halfway, you'll see these cheesy looking beige cardboard bubble packets sitting way up high where the managers sit:
You'll have to ask for someone to help you reach them, unless you're seven feet tall. These are what the packets look like up close, and what they cost:
New York Central got the whole lot of them in a buyout of another closing supplier, so once these are gone, they're gone. Fortunately, for anyone who might want them, they don't seem to sell well. Anyhow I've got them back at home now, and I've been playing around with them. I've narrowed it down to 8 that produce various effects I like, and I've been futzing around with them, like MK did.
My first impressions are that either these types of nib are either all made of unusually crappy and thin steel, or that the tinyness of the individual nibs having to share the space makes them weak, much like too many babies sharing a womb, or that this particular brand may just be crappy. I don't know, but nonetheless I've found some uses for these that might induce me to buy more anyway.
The nibs with evenly spaced, equal-sized points make hatching large areas really, really easy and SOOOOOOO much faster. They also make great speed lines.
The evenly spaced nibs with one point larger than the other make pleasantly dynamic and perfectly spaced pipes, dowels, poles, and rope. If I wanted to to an entire series of knot-tying illustrations, one of these nibs would very possibly save me from insanity.
The nibs with multiple slits cut going to the same point hold extra ink like a lettering nib while remaining flexible like a quill, and so far the best use I've found for these are really fantastic willowy tree limbs that you can draw with the line variation of a brush, but with a line quality that is unmistakably of a nib.
Anyhow, I'm gonna mess around with these some more and then do a proper post on them.
Finally a link: A fantastic interview with Mike Mignola about setting and architecture. One lesson learned: you neither need to like drawing, nor even actually draw, straight lines or perfect perspective in order to draw houses, cities, and other settings in a convincing and lively way. Slanty lines and age are your friends.
See you next week!
The biggest event in Comic Tools likely to happen this year or any other happened last Sunday, with Jim Woodring exhibiting his enormous pen, it's dripping tip gleaming in the light, to over 100 assembled men, women, and children. Woodring found the 25 pound black wooden shaft awkward and difficult to maneuver, and eventually resorted to just working with the tip, which produced much happier results.
Okay, enough dick innuendo. (Heh, in YOU end-o.) Seriously though, you have no idea how much I wanted to photoshop truck balls onto this thing. Or make a super-nerdy comics in-joke by having the tip going through a slice of pizza.
Dick jokes aside, I really, really love that this thing exists. It's actually really fascinating to me that his learning to use this thing wasn't all that different than the process I go through picking up any ordinary pen.
He had two nibs made, a steel prototype, and then a brass-plated, hand-engraved model, seen here:
Beautiful, right? But it turned out that that nib was actually a bit too stiff, and the steel nib was more flexible, so Jim put the better looking nib away in favor of the more practical prototype:
(The brass nib in the bucket of shame. click on this image for Glenn Fleichmann's great flickr set of this event.)
This happens to me all the time, when one nib will just be too damned stiff, and I have to chuck it and move on to another one in the box.
Here you can see Jim making the first lines with the stiffer brass nib, and all the dripping and control problems he was having:
At first he was cautiously getting a feel for what marks it could and could not make, and the frist drawing was pretty shabby looking, which always happens to me while learning a new tool.
But amazingly, not too far into the demonstration, Woodring's inking with the pen from Land of the Giants was virtually indistinguishable from his regular inking. Here he is inking a drawing with the Nibbus Maximus:
And at the end of this video you can see him inking with his regular pen:
The man clearly has a feel for the nib as a broad concept, and when you change the parameters, like size, ink thickness, and flexibility, he just has to take awhile to readjust his technique before he's mastered it as he would any other nib. It's way, way more interesting to watch than I thought it would be, and watching him have to struggle to adapt to the tool gave me insights into how any artist adapts to nib pens.
Many have pointed out that new Seattle transplant Scott Kurtz was at the event (as seen in the below photo), and I thought I'd take this opportunity to say what spectacular resources the podcast Webcomics Weekly (which he co-hosts) and accompanying book How to Make Webcomics (which he co-wrote) are. My good friend Erika Moen helped make herself a successful independent artist and businesswoman based on concepts she learned from these resources, and anyone who has a webcomic, are is looking to start a webcomic, would do well to buy the book and start listening to the podcast from episode 1.
Two additional things Woodring posted on his blog that I thought were cool, a guide to how nibs were made in the old days:
(Click to see larger.)
And this drawing of a frog being hit by lightning:
(Click to see larger.)
I notice that Wooding is wearing the exact same shirt and suit that he was wearing when I met him at an art opening, and I wonder if he's like me, with only one nice outfit that he just uses over and over at any vaguely fancy event.
In unrelated news, Dark Horse posted this really fantastic back and forth illustrated dialogue between editor Scott Allie and artist Guy Davis on the latest BPRD cover. It's a perfect example of an editor doing their job right, taking an okay idea and molding it into a great one, making the artist look good, and strengthening the narrative impact of the imagery.
Below, a special treat for you: A progression from Guy's thumbnails, to his pencils, to his inks from one of my favorite pages in that issue. Click to see it in all it's glory:
See you next week!
This week: What is this thing, and what do I do with it?
Comic Tools reader Stephen emailed me saying that his girlfriend has bought him a ruling pen (good girlfriend), and he was wondering what it was and what do you do with it.
A ruling pen is a very old-fashioned precision drafting tool. It it one of the tools that allowed illustrators and letterers to create the kind of super-precise drawings that people now use illustrator to create. Think stuff like the Sears and Robuck catalogue.
A ruling pen is basically a two-pronged fork of metal with a screw that allows you to bend the points closer together or farther apart.
To use the pen you dip it into ink about half an inch deep and then lift it out, Which will leave you with a very sizable bead if ink in between the prongs. The ink is held between the prongs by surface tension, and as long as you don't sharply hit the ruling pen it will stay there. Being able to hold so much ink at once means you can draw an insane amount of lines before you need to dip the ruling pen again. After you've dipped the ruling pen, you need to wipe the ink off the outsides of the pen's forks, or else it will crust on or smear where it's not wanted. I like using a folded up paper towel. You must be careful NOT to allow the ink inside the pen to touch the paper towel or it will suck up your entire load of ink.
Ruling pens aren't generally used as a freehand drawing tool- they excel at precise ruling of straight lines and curves. Whether you're using a ruler or a French curve or a triangle, you need something that has a beveled or elevated edge. If your ruler lies flat on the page then the ink will get sucked right under the ruler and spread. An elevated edge insures this won't happen. I have two elevated rulers, one with cork backing and one with foam rubber. I prefer the foam rubber because it has some traction and stays put even on an inclined drafting table. If your tool isn't beveled or elevated, you can tape pennies onto the bottom to raise it up.
To use the pen with a ruler or French curve, simply adjust the pen to the line width you want and draw against the edge of the ruler. Ruling pens will draw for a crazy amount of time with thin lines, but as you can see in the picture below (click to enlarge), the thicker you go the faster you use up ink. However, you can get around this problem (and draw a razor-straight line of any, literally ANY width) just by drawing two parallel straight thin lines and then filling in between them with a brush, or even digitally later. Old drafting tool sets also come with ruling pen attachments for their compasses, allowing you to ink the circles you've drawn with a totally even, uniform line. (which again, can be literally ANY width at all, by making two small lines and filling between them)
As you can see below, my ruling pen attachment has an adjustable joint to keep the ruling pen straight up and down with the paper, ensuring both prongs are always touching the page.
Next week: Tiny metal ball
This Week on Comic Tools: Lettering NibsThere was a period of a few years where I was really obsessed with achieving lettering like you see in old Sears and Robuck catalogues. One of the principal tools used to achieve solid block lettering was the lettering nib.
A lettering nib is a fixed-width (no flex) nib made for laying a lot of ink down in a specific shape. The tip of a lettering nib is a large shape of varying size that can be round or squared off, and when you draw with it you press the whole surface of the tip to the paper. Lettering nibs all have an extra piece of metal that fits over the nib to hold a huge bead of ink to feed the surface area of that enormous tip. Here's 3 different designs of ink resevoir, seen from the side: Lettering nibs are VERY easy to use, and much more forgiving to draw with than a normal nib. Because of the wide, inflexible tip, you can move slowly and deliberately and not get a wobbly line like you would slowing down with a flexible nib. In fact, there's only one trick to drawing with a lettering nib:
To get really crisp, invisible seams on the corners of your letters, latch the shape of the tip up to the line, and then draw. Perfect corners every time. If you get really good at this the lines look so clean they almost don't look like they were made by human hands. Or you can use the nib less carefully for lines that look neat yet have personality.
Make sure you always clean your lettering nibs after every use, because they can clog and lose function if you allow buildup. Make sure to wipe UNDERNEATH that extra piece of metal. Really get in there and floss the ink out. My friend Hilary recently have me some lettering nibs with this fantastic latch design that lets the nib pop wide open for easy cleaning. You'd think this design would be flimsy, but it's actually quite tight and robust.
Nibs depicted in this post:
Ross F. George patent Speedball U.S.A. made by Hunt Pen Co., Size A-3 (Small square) Ross F. George patent Speedball U.S.A. made by Hunt Pen Co., Size A-1 (Large square) Resterbrook and Co. Drawlet pen, size No. 3 (small round) Speedball Flicker U.S.A., George Patents, Hunt Pen Co., Size FB2 (large round w/flippy latch)
I don't know that strapping a raisin box to my head counts as a "hack", even by the loose definition I see on BoingBoing these days. I mean, if I pick something up, is that a "gravity hack?" Is any method of getting around and problem by any means now a hack? Now that thing I did a few years back to that busted fountain pen- that was a hack. (And let me address something some commenters brought up about that: I was fucking with a broken pen that I was going to throw out anyway. Some people seemed to think I was advocating doing this to a new pen, making Frankenstein out of perfectly healthy living people, so to speak. Do NOT do this to a new pen, or baby fountain pen Jesus will cry. Also, I have since found better ways to accomplish the same goals I did with this, ones much less aesthetically harmful to the pen. That having been said, years later it still works just fine.)
In any event I'm grateful that he was tickled enough to post about it and plug my blog on his. If you're reading, thanks Eliot!
as well as regular nibs, which are concave troughs of metal like this:
Most nib holders can only accept one or the other, and the holders for mapping nibs tend to be thin, exacerbating strain during fine work when using a tool used almost exclusively for fine work. The Tachikawa's thick body reduces wrist strain, and the rubber grip makes it easy to hold. Nibs sit securely in it, but the plastic isn't as rigid as on a Speedball holder, so you don't have to jam nibs in or strain to pry them out again.
