When I first broke into comics, 25 years ago kids! (16th March 2001 is my first 2000ad credit!) I somehow convinced myself that only by using a brush – a proper tool proper artists use – could I somehow be worthy of being a pro. Up until this point I’d been drawing with a Pilot V5 Tech point (a pen I still love).
John McCrea had suggested I get some obscenely long rigging brush, which he found easy to control but I found impossible. But It did lead me to my beloved (at the time) Sapphire Series 51 10/0 rigging brush.
A rigging brush is designed to help you paint the delicate line work of rigging, so tends to be longer than a normal brush and thinner. The 10/0 was akin to about 10 eye lashes strapped together.
A fine brush that took me quite a few years to get the hang on. Certainly those early lines were over worked, fussy and just too heavy in general. Combination of my inexperience as an artist and my inexperience with a brush.
But, as I got better with it, I started using it more like a pen. I still think the most natural and attractive line is one that comes from a brush. But these days I find a brush too difficult to handle. Partly my eyesight not being what it was and partly er… the handle – it’s very very thing. And arthritis make holding it a bit of a chore. I mean there are ways around it, I’m not adverse to wrapping most of the business end in a big ball of masking tape, but you never quite get it right.
Eventually I went to thicker brushes, but I could never get a good enough line, and the rolls royace of inking brushes Winsor & Newton SERIES 7 Kolinsky Sable Artists Brushes start around £20 for the #1s, and there was no way on earth I was ever gonna spend £20 on a brush when I knew how badly I treat brushes (SO BADLY – I’m sorry to all my brushes who I never managed to look after and who often spent more time being crunched underfoot rather than bathing in water to be cleaned)
SO I shifted gears to, sometimes brush pens, sometimes pen nibs (G is my current favourite) and sometimes digital. Right now, I’m on dip pens.
But brush remains the gold standard.
On a somewhat related note Șøštěr’ş Ġřęëñ (I refuse to lookup the spelling) are selling synthetic brushes for insanely cheap prices – 66p! Look they’re probably rubbish, but honestly, they might be good enough for filling in large black areas, and that’s what they’ll mostly be used for.
On Writing
I’ve posted this on bluesky already but I’m keeping it here because… well… it’s the 21st Century and nobody trusts social media any more….
Whats keeping me writing is the idea that ok, I’m not ever gonna be Alan Moore or Garth Ennis or (pick your favourite) but also they will never ever write exactly the thing I’m currently interested in and maybe it’s only me interested in it, but I’m also the only one writing it.
The more I explore writing, the more I stumble in to things that are interesting to me and the more I think we’ll I sure wish someone smarter than me was writing this, but then those people are finding their own thing to write about, so if it’s interesting to you, maybe it’ll be interesting to others. Maybe don’t worry about not being good enough to tell it. Tell it first, then worry afterwards, because honestly, it’s not like someone else is gonna tell the exact same story as you.
In contrast, I added this:
This is slightly different to what keeps me drawing. I love other artists work and I see it and think “Hell yeah, I want to do that” and then fail, but I enjoy the bit between “Hell yeah” and “oh that’s not turned out how I hoped”… so I keep doing it.
It’s funny to me, when I hear people say such-and-such an artist is so good it makes me want to quite, and I don’t know if it’s because I’m an idiot, but seeing someone better than me (and there’re quite a few) just makes me want to be better and do what they’re doing. (Unless they’re 30 years younger than me, but I get round that problem by just assuming they’re gifted geniuses, whereas I actually have to work at being any way half decent, so the fact I am is testament to the amount of work I put in. Oh you think I’m rubbish, we’ll you should see how bad I was before I practised my ass off.
There’s one of the terran omega stories I’m writing that I was thinking about last night, it would be issue 8 in a 12 issue arc. (I’m pretending that this is all happening, but it’s the only way I’ll get better as a writer is to er… write).
Anyway in this little short, it’s about … journey versus destination, and I was trying to unlock it in my head, I knew what was happening, and I knew what I wanted it to be about, and I thought oh I need a pov character. So I added one. And then….well I don’t want to spoil it, but it unlocked what it was about and why. Up until then my why was a more “just because this is the kind of thing I fancy drawing” and now it’s “oh IT’S ABOUT THIS THING”.
I find that happens a lot when I write, I have some very solid visual idea or something that will be cool in my head, and then mulling it over, telling mysdelf the story again and again, sometimes I’ll unlock the themes of it and discover it needs to just really pull together with that theme.
Is there anything more dull than talking about writing? Explaining jokes, or telling someone else your dreams maybe.
At least with drawing there’s some pretty pictures, but all you’ll get out of this is “And then I wrote a new draft”. Which is not thrilling. Anyway, please forgive my indulgence, but this is what you’re gonna get.
In other writing news
Sometime ago I wrote a terror tale for a 2000ad pitch sent it in, Matt liked it but wanted one (minor) change to the end, which … I never found time to do. So I’m going to make time next weekend (I’d better remember)
I also, was sat in the car with Pye Parr and talking about him writing his own stuff, came up with a fun short pitch, which was the first time I thought of a story with a eye on someone else drawing it. I recently reread the script I wrote up, and actually, I think it’s enormous fun. So, I think the following week I’ll dust it off and send as a pitch to 2000ad. Pye probably won’t have time to draw it, but I know another artists for whom this is perfectly in their wheel house.
I really am trying to make the time to write things, it’s hard because often you know these things will go nowhere (unless I draw them myself) and so you could write yourself hundreds of stories and they’ll just sit collecting dust.
But this year, at least, if I spend this year trying to focus spare attention on writing, I might make some progress in my abilities on that front, and maybe find a home for some of these things. We’ll see.
