Have your cake and eat it too!

My prop design from Scooby Doo!

How to Become a Comic Strip, Comic Book and Graphic Novel Artist

Tools of the Trade

3. Blending Stump - (aka blending stick and paper stump) Solid double-ended pointed blending stumps made of soft gray paper felt. Available in various sizes. When the point wears down or needs cleaning, just peel the top layers to reveal a smooth new point. Also easy to sharpen with a sanding block or emery board. Good for blending large areas of pencil art.

4. Tortillon - Shorter than a stump, pointed at one end only and is hollow. It is thinner and good to blend fine detail areas of pencil art. Made of soft paper and rolled. You can try to roll your own and any paper will do.

5. Cotton Swabs - Works well for smoothing pencil drawings and applying large areas of black ink quickly.

6. Square of toilet tissue - Good for blending pencil art and inexpensive. Roll it up tight and fold in half.

to be continued...

read next - Erasers are not for mistakes

previous - Pencilers Have Better Point Control

BONUS LINKS TO ART STORES!

http://www.blueroosterartsupplies.com/

http://www.artistcraftsman.com/

https://www.dickblick.com/

https://www.utrechtart.com/

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Remember… Just Create!

If you are interested in using these tools, then I recommend these products.

When you purchase a product by clicking the link below, I get a piece of the action and helps me to continue doing this blog. Support an artist today.

copyright 2012 H. Simpson

Pencilers Have Better Point Control

My Art for Disney Adventure Magazine Cover

How to Become a Comic Strip, Comic Book and Graphic Novel Artist

Traditional Tools

2. PENCIL SHARPENERS - You can use a wooden pencil, clutch pencil or a mechanical pencil.
Clutch pencils use 2mm graphite refills which are the same size as the wood cased pencils.
Mechanical pencils have graphite refill sizes such as .3mm, .5mm and .7mm

Let's look at how you sharpen all.

A wooden pencil can be sharpened with a manual, mechanical (hand powered) or electric sharpener. The blades inside the sharpener shaves the wood away and also grinds away your precious graphite.

To keep the most graphite available to you it's best to use a razor blade or Exacto knife to carve only the wood away.

Mechanical pencils save you from constant sharpening and in the long term are more effective and cheaper to use a than wooden pencil. You don't really have to sharpen the thinner graphite widths at all. The thicker graphite does require sharpening to get a fine point.

You may have noticed I didn't mentioned how to get the point back on the wooden pencils after you've carved away the wood with a blade. The answer is the same for getting the point back on a thick mechanical pencil; use sandpaper.

While you can purchase a sandpaper block/pad (sandpaper attached to wood), you should know by now I'm all for the most cost effective alternative. In this case it's best to buy sheets from the hardware store. Choose Sandpaper with a fine grit (grade) in the #180 to #100 range.

I used the sand paper block first and I was going through them quickly. I was in a hardware store and saw that the cost of a package of 10 (9" x 11") sheets was less than a sanding block for all the sandpaper I was getting. I bought that package and cut my own strips of 1" x 2" as I needed them and have have been using that package for years. I haven't purchased sandpaper again.

You may also want to try an emery board.

to be continued...

read next - Have your cake and eat it too!
previous - Tools of the Trade

Keep reading and follow me. If you have found this helpful please let me know and share with other creators. Feel free to ask me questions.

Remember… Just Create!

If you are interested in further expanding your knowledge, then I recommend these books.

When you purchase a book by clicking the link below, I get a piece of the action and helps me to continue doing this blog. Support an artist today.

copyright 2012 H. Simpson

Tools of the Trade

My pencil drawing of Peter Falk as Columbo

How to Become a Comic Strip, Comic Book and Graphic Novel Artist

Traditional Tools

1. PENCILS - A non-repro blue pencil is great to use because you don't have to erase it. Anything that saves you time is an asset. Saving time becomes very important when you need every second to meet a deadline. 

Now if for some reason you do not want to use a non-repro blue pencil, then you can use a regular gray pencil. Even though pencils are referred to as having lead, it is really mostly graphite. We call it graphite because the man who discovered graphite thought he had found lead. Today, graphite and clay are mixed with water and pressed very tightly together with high temperatures into thin rods. Graphite gets it name from the Greek word meaning "to write".

You really can use any type of pencil to draw. Be aware that soft graphite smears and makes a mess and hard graphite can dig into the paper if you're not careful.

Art pencils use the English scale to grade graphite which is a combination of numbers and letters with "B" standing for soft graphite that gets blacker the softer it is and much messier. The higher the number the softer the graphite and the more it smears.

"H" stand for hardness of the graphite. The higher the number, the harder the graphite and the lighter the pencil mark made.

"F" stands for fine point. As you start from F to 9H the pencil is able to hold a fine point longer.

The American grading system uses numbers. You may have used a number 2 in elementary school as a kid and HB is equivalent to that pencil. So you can keep using it to draw if you wish. But you may want to put your big boy pants on (or big girl panties) and do something bold; EXPERIMENT.

The fun of art is exploring and playing with the tools to see what they can do. Run away from anyone that tells you you should use an HB or 2B pencil. Buy every pencil grade and draw with them all and see what works for you. 

When I don't use non-repro blue, I have personally settled on a 2 pencil combination. I use the 4H to do rough drawing, then use a 2B to tighten it up darker. Why? Because the 4H pencil lines I don't have to erase. Once I lay down a darker graphite the 4H lines are barely noticeable.

So what are you waiting for? Go play with pencils!

to be continued...

BONUS LINKS TO CHECK OUT NOW!

Drawing techniques: 7 fundamentals of pencil drawing

Drawing - Tips on Better Graphite Pencil Drawing

Pencil Drawing Techniques for Beginners

Line Drawing: A Guide for Art Students

2B or Not 2B? A Guide to Pencil Drawing Techniques

read next - Pencilers Have Better Point Control

previous - Talk Dirty to Me

Keep reading and follow me. If you have found this helpful please let me know and share with other creators. Feel free to ask me questions.

Remember… Just Create!

If you are interested in further expanding your knowledge, then I recommend these books.

When you purchase a book by clicking the link below, I get a piece of the action and helps me to continue doing this blog. Support an artist today.

copyright 2012 H. Simpson

Talk Dirty to Me

This art is a character design for a project that didn't go anywhere.

How to Become a Comic Strip, Comic Book and Graphic Novel Artist

TERMINOLOGY CONTINUED

38. THUMBNAILS - A drawing that can be as small as your thumbnail and no larger than your hand. The main purpose is not drawing, but to quickly get you ideas down on paper. It helps the artist more than anyone else, as the artist is the only one able to decipher the chicken scratch.

39. CMYK - C is cyan, M is magenta, Y is yellow and K stands for key. The cyan, magenta and yellow printing plates are carefully keyed or aligned with the key of a pure black ink, the key plate or keyline color. Full-color images use 4 colors of ink on printing presses . The four inks are placed on the paper in layers of dots that combine to create the illusion of many more colors. Image files must be converted to CMYK color space to print correctly.

40. TIFF - Tagged Image File Format. File format used for bit-mapped images to be printed. Files in TIFF format usually end with a .tif extension.

41. EPS - Encapsulated PostScript. PostScript documents that contain information for more accurate printing. Usually larger in size than a TIFF file because of added information.

42. PDF - Portable Document Format is an open standard file format that looks like original documents and preserve source file information

43. FONT - a complete set of type of one style and size.  A specific member of a type family such as roman, boldface or italic type. A font family is typically a group of related fonts which vary only in weight, orientation, width, etc., but not design

44. TYPEFACE - the artistic representation or interpretation of characters; it is the way the type looks. A consistent visual appearance or style which can be a "family" or related set of fonts. A typeface such as Caslon may include roman, bold and italic fonts.

45. DPI/LPI/PPI - DPI (dots per inch) is a measurement of printer resolution. The number of dots per inch that the printer is capable of achieving to form text or graphics on the printed page.

PPI (pixels per inch) is the number of pixels present per inch of display screen. This is for monitors, scanners and digital cameras, even though DPI has been applied inaccurately to refer to screen resolution by laymen and now has fallen into common usage. 

LPI (lines per inch) is a measurement related to the way printers reproduce photographic images using a halftone screen. The LPI is dependent on the output device and the type of paper. This term is used only for printing.

46. RESOLUTION - A measure of the sharpness of an image or of the fineness with which a device (such as a video display, printer or scanner) can produce or record such an image usually expressed as the total number or density of dots, pixels or lines in an image. The higher the resolution the better the quality. 

The resolution is only going to be as good as the output device. So it's a waste of time creating a 1200 dpi image if it's printing from a 600 dpi printer. The image prints at 600 dpi.

47. NON-REPRO BLUE/NON- PHOTO BLUE - It is a particular shade of blue that can not be detected by graphic arts cameras used for professional printing. However, most scanners will pick up the blue.

48. RGB - R is red, G is green and B is blue. Red, green and blue light is added together to form full color images to be transmitted  and displayed on electronic monitors. RGB color space should never be used for printing.

49. JPEG, PNG and GIF - A few of the options and alternatives for the coding of still images for the internet. These are usually 72dpi RGB images and not good to use for print purposes.

Next: The Tools of the Trade

BONUS LINKS!

Graphics File Format Types and When To Use Each One 

Which Image File Types Should I Use?

Image File Type Tips

read next - Tools of the Trade

previous - Talking the Talk

Keep reading and follow me. If you have found this helpful please let me know and share with other creators. Feel free to ask me questions.

Remember… Just Create!

If you are interested in further expanding your knowledge, then I recommend these books.

When you purchase a book by clicking the link below, I get a piece of the action and helps me to continue doing this blog. Support an artist today.

copyright 2012 H. Simpson

Costume design

Costume Design

Costume design I did for a convention booth babe.

Keep reading and follow me. +1 me. Share with your friends. Please comment. Just create!

copyright 2012 H. Simpson

Hellboy

A recent Hellboy commission.

Hellboy

Keep reading and follow me. +1 me. Share with your friends. Please comment. Just create!

copyright 2012 H. Simpson