Volume 3 Page 10
Posted April 4, 2017 at 12:01 am

As I’ve noted earlier, this 8-page story uses a slightly different medium than the usual Empowered installment; it’s drawn on larger, 10” X 13” linen-finish cardstock instead of the smaller, smooth-finish 8.5” X 11” copy paper I normally use. So, this seemed like a fine opportunity for a Twitter mini-rant about tools and techniques, here reformatted for your reading convenience.

The following mini-rant was inspired by an interesting video making the rounds on twitter recently.

To me, this video proves a different point than the stated admonition of "It's not about the pen, it's about the practice." Finding which tools work for you—cheap or not!—and which tools don’t is a key element of practice. Plus, let's face it, that marker he's using might be cheap—but it also works pretty damn well for calligraphy, unlike a thousand other pens that could’ve been chosen.

Yeah, sure, young artists can easily get obsessed with finding “magic” art tools, misguidedly perceiving them as shortcuts to improvement. Pretending that the proper choice of art tools is merely a meaningless distraction, however, is BS of a differently misguided kind. In truth, no one can make any art medium work equally well. Some tools and techniques will suit a particular artist better than others. 

Don’t anyone “art-shame” you into not tracking down new art supplies by implying that any tool should suffice for artwork. Not true. While there are no “magic tools” that can level-up your artistic skills overnight, you do need to find the tools that are magical for you.

Example: At the Kubert School, I worked for years to ink with a brush, and did, in fact, brush-ink my first two Dirty Pair miniseries. But once I ditched the brush and started inking with a Hunt EF104 pen-tip, my work was supercharged overnight. Magic (for me) tool, ahoy!

I create Empowered with an almost hilariously specific set of art tools—though this isn’t funny, as these tools will someday become useless. I use one batch of a single type of pencil lead—5B Turquoise—on one side only of a single type of paper—Staples Fine Laser Paper, 32 lbs. If I pencil with anything harder than a very, very soft 5B lead, several of my chronic drawing-hand issues recur almost overnight. And even those baby-soft 5B leads perform well only on the non-grainy side of a sheet of the aforementioned Staples Fine Laser Paper. Ah, but inevitably, in time the consistency of both these pencils and paper will shift and render them useless for my drawing purposes.

I began drawing Empowered 13+ years ago with Staedtler-Mars 3B 2mm leads, ’til the company stopped making them. Stockpiled em too late, alas. Even sadder, my Staedtler 3B-lead stockpile is now useless, as my drawing hand deteriorated over time. Those old 3Bs are now too hard for me.

Happily switched over to Staedtler-Mars 4Bs for a few years, until their graphite consistency shifted and the leads became too hard. Switched over to Turquoise 6Bs for quite a while until—wait for it—their graphite consistency shifted and the leads became too hard. Now, I’m using a specific batch of Turquoise 5Bs that, inexplicably, are softer than the 6Bs they replaced. (No idea why.) Yay, pencils!

I’ve also had to repeatedly switch original-art paper stock over the course of Empowered, each time because the paper’s consistency shifted. So, inevitably, the medium I now use to draw the series will eventually shift and become unusable. Someday I will, undoubtedly, have to switch over to digital-based drawing, as pencil-based artwork with less-than-ideal leads just takes too much of a toll on my hand.

Mini-rant over! We now return to our regularly scheduled—if necessarily minimalistic, right now—commentaries.

-Adam Warren

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