I’ve seen a few illustrators and cartoonists filling this little survey out on their blogs recently. I’ve had a couple of people email me, asking about my tools and techniques recently as well, so I figured I’d jump on the bandwagon.
Phil McAndrew
Comics: The Secret Thoughts of Harold Lawrence Windcrampe, This & That, contributions to You Ain’t No Dancer, other assorted web and mini comics.
Website: www.philintheblanks.com
Making comics since year of: the beginning of time
Art education/schools attended: BFA in Illustration from Daemen College, advanced art classes throughout high school
Pencils: More often than not, I don’t use pencils. I’ll usually go straight to ink with my rough drawings. Sometimes I’ll “pencil” digitally, doing my roughs in photoshop and then printing them out. When I do use an actual pencil, I usually just use a mechanical pencil, no particular brand, just whatever I have laying around.
Inks: I use Winsor & Newton black Indian ink. It has a neat drawing of a spider guy wearing a top hat on the bottle.
Brushes: I used to be very picky when it came to brushes, but these days I just use any old thing. I kind of like having brushes that are old and beat up. I get more interesting lines out of them. I have an old size 2 Raphael brand brush that a friend gave me. I use it more than any of my other brushes.
Pens: I have a cheap little set of nibs that I bought a really long time ago, I’m not even certain what company made them. I’ve been using those to ink everything lately. I really abuse them too, often trying to snag them against the grain of the paper on purpose and stuff.
Paper: It depends on what I’m working on and how large I want to draw it, I guess. For most illustrations, I work on smooth 100 lb. bristol. Sometimes I’ll use 140 lb. cold press (particularly if I plan on watercoloring). Sometimes I just use ordinary 8.5″ x 11″ printer paper.
Lettering: Lately I’ve been lettering everything by hand using my wacom tablet. It’s just easier, I think. When I try to letter by hand with ink I usually just end up making a big mess, and lettering (usually) is the one thing that I don’t want to make a mess of.
Color: Most of the time I just color digitally in photoshop with my tablet, especially with comics. Sometimes with illustrations I’ll watercolor them, scan the watercolors in, and then mess around with them in photoshop.
Layout/ Composition: For comics I always just sit and thumbnail everything out really loosely in a sketchbook, mostly focusing on getting the idea onto paper. Then I spend some time breaking it up into pages and panels on scarp paper, really concentrating on getting the flow and pacing perfect. after that I jump into pencils (or more often digital pencils, as I mention above). I feel like the biggest tool I use in this stage is instinct.
Convention Sketches (when different from illustrations done in the studio): My convention sketches are usually just drawn with fine tipped pen of some sort. I think I’ve been using a pilot V5 rolling ball lately, or something.
Tool timeline, starting from when you began drawing in any serious way until the present, and what spurred the changes: Back in high school I decided I wanted to get serious about comics and so I started inking with a nib pen. I wasn’t really getting the lines I wanted though and right around the time I started college i switched over to inking with a brush. I started out with a realllyyy tiny brush and somehow still drew lots of things with big, ugly, boring lines. Eventually I got better with brushes and moved up to a size 2 and I stuck with that through most of college. Since finisheing college, I’ve mostly been using a combination of both nibs and brushes, doing most of the inking with a nib and then sometimes augmenting the lines with a brush.
What tools you’d never use, and why: Sharpies. for a little while I drew with them as a teenager. Now when I see people drawing with them, I cringe! I don’t think I will ever even consider using adobe illustrator to make comics or illustrations either, it just seems to boring and lifeless to me. I prefer to make a mess, for my drawings to be filled with happy accidents and adventure.
