I wish I took a pencils before picture. He kind of reminds me of that The Dare guy that works with Charli XCX. Maybe it’s just the suit.

Been really digging the more tiny screentones lately, I use to (and still kind of am) partial to 27.5L or 30L, that way the dots are really big and noticeable, but for the smaller stuff that you blow up (this guy is 4 inches tall), it works out really well, and takeds a bit of a back seat while still having that screentone fun.

All of this stuff is either a part of a series or I’m really in a rutt!

I’m pretty sure that was a line in Yellowstone.

Some asshole on a online art forum when I was 18 or 19 said I should stop pairing my drawings with words. I don’t think I ever truly stopped, but it did make me feel weird about pairing my work with words for a while. Fuck that guy.

A little Victorian Bug since I started the new Bridgerton.

This Dracula is Sassy. 🧛🏻‍♂️ Terminally Sassy. Maybe he has devil vibes. Who knows!

It was an inking day yesterday. Those are fewer and farther between lately, mostly because I can only ink sitting at the drafting table and i am not enjoying sitting at the drafting table lately. Also I gotta sit like an asshole to get to the right position to make those lines i like.

All done with the Pentel Pigment ink brushpen on Strathmore 400 drawing, with a lil bit of Gelly Roll whiteouts and screentone.

Behind the cut is a head that I ripped out and isolated, and a version of the scan I did which is better than the photos than some, but the scan gets a little fuzzy up by the wire on the sketchbook.

Another thing I did for work, we had a little bracket competition between different departments in the store, and we did some Garbage Pail Kids esque illustrations for them, I got to do our Thrift Store Side.

This is the closest I’ve come to a series of spot illustrations since I was in college. I tried to keep it pretty consistent in feel, and I used more hard tipped brush pens in these than I’ve used in nearly anything else ever. I was reading a lot on Alex Toth the last few weeks which inspired to mess with those more than I ususally would (though he was more of a Flair pen guy).

These were all quick, efficient (done before work!), and all lightbox inked which made for easy cleanup, just a little white out in spots.

More after the cut.

We are having a Mail Art show at work and I figured I should have something in it. I had intended to actually send it through the mail but I didn’t make this until the day before the show, so I hand delivered it by courier (lol). It’s nothing super special but it’s the first piece I’ve made on a deadline in forever, and that felt really nice. Accomplishment.

This sucker uses 60L tone, which I’m not too big a fan of but I bought it so I gotta use it at some point. I had been shaving a little bit a the beginning of this year, and I thought it’d be fun to put those toilet paper bandages on his face, I had to do that a bit while I was shaving. I’m done shaving for a bit now, personally.

It’s also drawn on a envelope I bought at work, making it one of my only true works with reuse materials, go me.

This was originally in my zine, Pencil Snob, but I thought it would be a good one to put on the site.

I’m sure if you’ve heard of anything in pencils currently made that isn’t a Dixon Ticonderoga, you’ve heard about the Blackwing 602. There is a Blackwing 602 out now, but it is not the original Blackwing 602. Cal Cedar got the rights to produce a new pencil under the old name, but they don’t have the same lead formula, which was the most important part (though I will admit it is close enough).

The original Blackwing was produced by Eberhard Faber, and it has a cult following. It was a much softer writing oriented pencil than most people were used to when introduced (think a 2B to a 4B), in a world where pencils were a little grittier and harder (the harder the pencil the longer they last!). It was also potentially the first pencil impregnated with wax, making it an even smoother writer.

But those are no longer produced. People love the story and the people who used them (John Steinbeck, Chuck Jones, Richard Dreyfus in Jaws, etc.) so they want one of the originals. I know I did. With supply low, and demand high, that means they cost money. $50 is probably the cheapest you’ll find a single pencil unsharpened, 12 packs go for $500 to $1000 or so depending on the version (the ones from the 1930’s fetch a higher price).

It’s no better than a pencil produced today (the Mitsubishi Hi-uni in 2B feels like a close dupe, the Tombow Mono 100 in 2B is similar, and the Palomino Blackwing 602 is honestly close enough as well). In fact, I would say most pencils produced today are just as good or better.

The Pentel Black Polymer 999 (pictured above as well) also fetches a high price. I bought 3 of these for 50 bucks, and it was 100% not worth it. The paint lacquer is thin, feels cheap, and I didn’t find the lead inside to be worth the price of a 12 pack of Mitusbishi Hi-unis for a singular pencil.

If you find any of these for a deal, they are fun to try, but don’t expect the results to be mind blowing. This is pretty much true for all vintage pencils. They are pretty and fun to have, but at the end of the day a readily available modern version exists and is 10 to 100 times cheaper.

This is the first thing I’ve colored in a while (done in Affinity Photo 2). The colors changed the feel of the piece for sure. I liked it, thus why you are seeing it in color. Inked on Strathmore Drawing 400 Smooth paper. Just the proper ammount of tooth to smooth ratio, takes ink really well. I’ll include the pencils and the inks too below.

Most of the sketch is here. It took a few tries to make that happen. I kept trying to do this in graphite as a final but it just never worked, I don’t know if I’ll ever figure out a way for that to look presentable. It’s usually way too tight and stiff when I use pencil as a final medium, never ever retains anything of the looseness of a sketch.

This thing is also teenie tiny, like 3 inches across.