HOW TO DRAW COMICS:
INKING WITH A BRUSH pt 2

Continuing the real-life saga of one man’s struggle against his art materials!

For most of us, using a brush is just plain unnatural. We’ve all grown up with pencils and ball point pens, and frankly a brush just feels weird. When you push a pencil against paper, you can feel the paper pushing back (assuming you have a proper drawing surface underneath). The pressure tells you how hard to push in order to get the darkness of line you want. The greater the pressure, the darker the line.

With a brush, however, there’s no (noticeable) pressure difference between drawing a thick line or missing the paper completely. So how do you do it?

The primary answer is always practice. A lot about learning any new technique comes down to experimenting with your materials. But if you wanted to rely on trial and error you wouldn’t be reading this column, right? So let me give you some pointers.

First, you need to know how to hold the brush. There’s no great difference, when it comes to inking comic pages, between the way you hold a brush and the way you probably already hold a pencil. But let’s explore it anyway.

Grip the brush lightly between your thumb and forefinger while resting the ferrule (that metal bracket that holds the hairs of the brush) on the side of your middle finger next to the nail. Now rest the side of your hand on the paper with your pinkie curled up but relaxed. You’ll notice that the biggest knuckle on your pinkie (the first one down from the hand, not the one joining the pinkie and the hand) will be resting on the paper.

You’ll probably also notice that the bottom-most bone at the outside of the heel of your hand (this is called the pisiform bone) is also resting on the paper. These two bones form a kind of axis from which the brush can be lowered toward or lifted away from the paper.

Oh, and always try to keep your hand relaxed as much as possible since this will help give you more control and keep your hand from cramping.

Now adjust where you hold the brush between your fingers. For greatest control, hold the ferrule as close to the hairs as possible, making sure not to touch the hairs themselves since this makes a mess on your hand and causes flakes of ink to build up at the base of the brush — not good for the brush. For looser work, hold the brush further up the handle. Here’s where experimenting is necessary to find what’s comfortable for the kind of line you want to make.

For examples of professional inkers and how they hold a brush, check out the video resources in the Agitainment Forum here and here.

Now try it. You’ll find that getting a certain thickness of line is largely a matter of varying where you grip the brush on the handle combined with the angle your hand pivots from the pinkie-pisiform axis. That, and of course practice.

Next week: More about brush control in: Inking With a Brush, part 3!

Ex animo!