Back to the basics. I’m still fairly new to digital art. I’ve been enjoying it but I’ve really missed the thrill of inking with a nib and ink. It’s been a bit of a re-learning curve. You can see the difference between the picture of young Thorin being a brat and older Thorin in the photo beneath it. It’s taken a few practice pictures but I’m finally starting to remember how to ink with nibs!

Holy crap. I wrote a novel about inking with nibs below the cut.

When you ink with a nib you are opening yourself up to oopsies! There is danger in every stroke you attempt! The most common sort of oopsies are:

You have to sit and really think about the order of the lines you’ll be drawing in order to avoid oopsies! 

I’m right-handed so I tend to start in the upper-left of a picture and work my way to the right so there’s less chance of me dragging through wet ink. I use Paris Bleedproof paper which is smoooooth and beautiful and never catches my nib! I work with short strokes when I can and I take a moment to centre myself before I attempt long strokes. Each long stroke is also a brand-new dip into the ink so I don’t run out of ink mid-line. 

I test the nib I’ll be using by drawing some warm-up lines on scrap paper or writing a sentence out. Nibs are ever-changing tools, btw. A brand -new nib needs cleaning to remove the manufacturer’s oils then I like to draw lines with it until that brand-new sharpness is dulled. OR I’ll save a brand-new nib for doing fine detail work. As you use your nib, it gets duller and duller. You can see your lines changing as you work. Back when I was inking comic pages, I’d have a few nibs lined up, ready to swap out when the one I was using got too dull.

I wipe my nibs off on an old piece of denim. I find I don’t get fuzz if I use denim. I keep the denim across my lap.

Pigment liners just can’t get as black as dip ink can get, imo. It doesn’t matter much anymore, when you can just scan the work and adjust levels in Photoshop, but when you’re photocopying your pages for zines and stuff, the dark lines copy over really nice.

I’m using Windsor Newton inks. They’re not bad? That darn ‘red’ that I bought, which was labelled ‘Scarlet’ is more of a ‘berry pink’. -_- As you can see from young Thorin’s cheeks above. -_- That is why I did not ink some crazy ass battle field picture for Tolkien week. It just wouldn’t have been the same with berry pink blood flying everywhere. 

My default nib of choice is a Deleter G nib. It’s a good, general purpose nib that can get some good line variation if I want it to. I have used other nibs but a G nib is my preference for most pictures.

The nib holder in the photo above? That you can’t get just anywhere. It’s made out of balsa wood and is over a hundred years old and was given to me by my grandmother. ^_^ It’s so light in my hand! 

It’s a pity some ancestor of mine chewed on it. Grandma said it hadn’t been her. Mmmhmmmmm… I have tried plastic nib holders but they feel so heavy and I can feel the line that runs up them. Blah.

Regarding the picture in the photo… the pencils will be posted on Thursday and the colour-inked version will be posted next Tuesday. Hopefully ‘berry pink’ is Thorin’s colour. XD