Here are some photos that show my inking process, tools and work space for my latest pen and ink drawings. There are also some photos of a great Play-Doh penguin that Angie made for me :)

Here I am working on the Ysbryd drawing with Angie’s Play-Doh penguin keeping me company. I’m adding the fine background lines with a 0.1 Sakura Micron.

I start my pen and ink drawings with a pencil drawing to lay out the forms and composition. Here you can see the pencil under-drawing. I use a click-pencil for this part of the process and the red one pictured here is a Niji Grip 0.5mm. The paper I have been using is Bristol Board which is a lovely smooth surface for pen and ink.

After the pencil drawing I ink in the main forms with a small nibbed pen and you can see the result of this step in this photo. The pen to the right in this photo is an amazing Japanese brush pen that my parents bought me for Christmas. It makes the most wonderful brush like marks and the ink flows really smoothly. I love this pen. You can see a close-up of its synthetic brush head below.

Here’s a photo of my workspace while I work on the insect pen and ink drawing. I work on a flat Ikea table that has a white laminate finish (it was really cheap…I think only $30). For the insect drawing I referenced National Geographic’s January 2006 issue that had a great spread on mantids and that helped me with the main character’s design, Trychfil. Usually when I work on a drawing or painting I work on character, prop and environment designs/poses in a ‘design’ sketchbook that I use solely for this purpose. You can see this design book underneath the National Geographic magazine with some designs for Trychfil and the tree branches. You can also see the pocket sized moleskine that I carry around to doodle in. This is where most of my characters usually start. Once I pick out the characters from one of my doodle books I usually play around with their designs in my design book. I try to keep my character doodles pretty simple and I draw them all in pen.

Here’s Angie’s Play-Doh penguin. Hope you like the photos and have a good weekend :)