I'm always joking that its the German in me that is obsessed with cataloging and organizing everything in my art inventory. I have no idea how idea how many hours ive spent making color sheets for my inks, paints, markers, pencils, etc. It really does come in handy though to do that sort of footwork: it takes all of the guesswork out of how your supplies are going to react to each other, and we all can feel some level of pity or empathy towards spending a ton of time inking or coloring a project to find out that "oh, these markers aren't marker-proof" or "oh crap, these inks have no level of light fastness whatsoever."
I'm about to work on inking a picture for a character or two and I was like "you know what, it wont kill you to try and use your nib pens instead of your felt-tips once in a blue moon." and with art supplies, depending on how you take care of them there is a certain level of urgency: ink binders break down, paints dry out, pencils can become brittle and 'stale', pens can shrivel up. use it or lose it. OR, take really good care of it. I have tria markers that are around 10 years old that ive kept nice and happy by putting them in a air-tight plastic bin and letting them sit in a dark cool place. (dark because light will react with ink binders and break them down, cool because humidity stays most constant at around room temp and a little lower.)
LET THE MAGIC BEGIN!
First off, I scanned in my ref for this whole project. it took maybe 30 minutes, and that's just because i was sort of dicking around a bit. This will help put a visual to what im about to say (a poorly scanned one! KHAAAAAAN~!!).
What didn't scan was the very end of the paper that said what was a pigment pen and what was a dip pen. But thats okay, I'll fill you in!
Pigment Pens
Prismacolor finerliner ~ Radiograph Nexus
I usually use pigment pens. They come in all sorts of styles - rollerball, felt tip, cartridge insets (usually using some form of calligraphy nib). For ease of use nothing beats a pigment pen and they are easy to gather up as well as fairly inexpensive.
I personally like felt tip pens (sakura micron, copic fineliners) but thats in part because I was raised on them. they are both water + solvent resistant and while they can be a little pricier than some of their other felt-tip brethren (microns: 3~5$ each, copics 5~8$ each) they last forever if taken care of and come in something like 8 different sizes. there is a lot of variation you can get with them overall.
The biggest problem with pigment pens is that when you are using them the amount of pigment ink hitting the paper is a much lower concentration than you'll get with a dip pen. if youre like me and you just ink right over your pencils instead of using a cover (tracing paper, vellum) you can experience smearing or fading. Copics are pretty resistant to both, but their availability and price also makes them a PITA if you're on a budget or just learning. Microns are a standard i recommend to most people pissing around or just starting on doing commission-grade work because while they do fade under lots of erasing, its a lot less severe than prismacolor fineliners and doesnt show at all if all you're doing is inking lines for comics.
You get what you pay for really, and sometimes you cant believe what a product is telling you. In example, Itoyas write-up claims its both alcohol + water resistant, and in truth its water resistant and fairly marker resistant, but you can still tell it gets furry when you run over it with xyrene markers or alcohol solvents.
Dip Pens
Deleter Black ~ Acee's Witches brew
I'd love to give a huge detailed write-up on these, but truth be told I rarely use dip pens. Collectively, they are actually fairly more cost effective if you are using ink on a regular basis and the line variation you can get is infinitely wider than that reached by pigment pens. I used a G-nib quill to test most of these out (save for the last one, which i'll explain.)
To get one question out of the way: why isnt Higgins ink on here? Frankly, Higgins ink is absolute tripe. Its not very water resistant and has ruined more than one of my trias before. Yes, it is inexpensive, but its also cheap garbage. you'd be better skipping out on mcdonalds one day and investing in better ink that'll last you for years. (the bottle i have is well over 4 years old and still is just fine.)
Deleter Black is a japanese import ink i fell in love with for painting in black spaces a few years back, and it is relatively cheap. I used version 1, but beware that each number of ink is used for something slightly different (usually darker, more matte, etc.) DB1 is the cheapest and fits my purposes for just using it to dick around. again, this ink is about 6 years old and still works just great. the only thing i noticed is that it is not waterproof. it isnt even water resistant. As for markers? great, it works just fine with no smearing. but dont bother using this with water. (supposedly DB4 is completely waterproof.) Downfall? ive only every found 2 places in the US that keep it in permanent stock.
Windsor Newton Black Indian ink is a little bit more expensive (4$ for the little ones and 12$ for the big ones), but it comes in a sturdy glass bottle and the bigger one has a nice little ink dropper on the top for ease of use. If you're coloring with either water or copic markers you should be fine, although for some reason when i took a few passes over it with tria it started getting fuzzy. trias are a heartier marker so it may have just been that the solvent flow was a lot more ham-handed than you get with copics. (Trias were/are primarily used by fashion designers and layout artists who are a lot less worried about pained details and more interested in getting a general idea down. Copics are a lot more dainty as far as how they handle and can create much more painterly effects. I still use them interchangeably though.)
Acee's Ink is something im brand new to, and as much as it was talked up to me I'm really not sure of its day-to-day ease for illustrators. It was sold to me as a "standard for comic inking" which I think was just someones halfassed attempt at trying to marker a fade-proof, solvent based grafitti ink to unwitting idiots like me with 10$ to blow. I'll give it props for being dark and resistant to EVERYTHING (I even rubbed solvent on a bit of another piece of paper and it took a good while before it started to give in), but as far as a drawing ink Id say "probably not." Not only is it solvent based, but its so heavily pigmented that it wont flow through any sort of nib structure, metal or bamboo or otherwise. I finally got it to work with just a plain comic painters brush but then i had to break out the turpanoid because it wont come out with water. This also complicates the fact that it wont run through a nib because the normal response is to thin it down with distilled water or airbrush extender, and that wont cut it with this stuff. I'm currently on an open ticket with the companies people to see if i cant figure out a way to thin this stuff down without completely destroying its unbelievable 'not even an atomic bomb can touch this shit' properties, but I have until then to wait.
*looks at time*
wowsers. I hope someone finds all this useful!
3 comments:
Good god! You reminded me how it's been over 3 years since I've last dipped my head in a closet and organized all of my items. Damn your graceful organizing skills!
But really, this is a helpful bit of information since using the right choice of inks have been a problem with me. Then again I never was a great inker. I've used microns, zig milleniums and PITT's for years and somehow I manage to make my stuff look like fady shitty mass of something I can't comprehend. I was suggested to try nibs, and when money is available I'm going to try them again, despite how much I hated the experience last time.
Which brings me to this; I stumbled upon a small jar of pigmented black ink called Speedball, and I wondered if you had an opinion on it and whether or not it would be good for dicking around with a nib.
in a somewhat selfish, ego-fueled series of ideas I have been throwing around the idea of putting up some series of short PDF tutorial files on using just regular, everyday things for artists that people just dont pay attention to. people dont nessicarily need a college education to be good artists but so many artists remain so woefully ignorant to the very supplies they profess to have an attachment to.
I'm glad you enjoyed me going off on some bizzare tangent about all of this ink stuff. i hope it helped but even if it didnt, it was probably pretty amusing eh? *laughs*
As for speedball I have used it before but not for strictly black/white inking stuff. its waterproof once dried, or so speaks the website blurb, but for some reason I doubt its likely completely water-proof or completely solvent-proof. They make a wide gamut of prodcuts, none of them that im aware of being terribly high-end things. when I worked at the art store they were a good learning-the-ropes, middle-ground affordable brand and ive used their block-printing ink and screenprinting ink without major issues or bursting into flames. however, that being said I think speedball on average is probably only a step or two above higgins. you'll never know until you check. Ive used thier calligraphy ink before with great success, so perhaps if you buy one of the little glass wells of black calligraphy ink. i think the calligraphy ink is likely made with a higher quality ink binder (i think its a gum arabic derivative?) so it may give you a more stable line that doesnt bend as badly under water or markers.
whatever the case, tell me what comes of your experiments! <3
THANK YOU. i completely agree with higgins. The stuff is absolute crap, and i find the 'black magic' india reeks.
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