Let's talk pencils for art

[Winter_Wolf]

I've come to the conclusion that while I can use the ol' PC and a graphics program to make art, I still prefer the feel of pencil and paper, at least for the initial black-and-white. Also, I can take pencil and paper with me to the cafe but I really don't fancy taking my expensive (at least compared to some paper and a pencil) laptop there. Plus I don't need to sit next to an electrical outlet.

I generally favor a HB/2B mechanical pencil in the 0.5mm range. Sometimes I'll mix it up with a drawing lead or #2 pencil, but the mechanical gives me a good line and allows fine detail. On the plus side, regular and polymer leads are ubiquitous; you can get good stuff just about anywhere for cheap. On the negative, you need to erase your lines after you've inked or it's a mess. And I know I've smudged "a few" images that way.

I've used a non-photo blue normal (wood) pencil, but the lead breaks a lot and it's hard to keep it sharp. I used to like it because as the name suggests, it doesn't show up when you make a photocopy of it, allowing clean inking.

Today I read that if you're using a scanner, you can use red lead in much the same way as blue by applying a filter or something (I'm kind of sketchy on this point) in Photoshop. This interests me because there zero local shops that carry blue "lead" for a mechanical pencil, but I can get the red in a 4+1 pack of HB leads for mechanical pencil. Anyone used the colored mechanical pencil leads, red or blue? How to they handle, e.g. do they break often, or do you have to press really hard to get a visible line, etc?

What about lead holders? This is essentially a sheath that holds lead, 2mm seeming to be common. There's regular lead, blue "lead" and red "lead". Anyone used any of these?

And then there's the liquid pencil. I haven't tried one yet, but as I've lost my last good mechanical pencil I have to go replace it tomorrow, and I'm thinking about picking one of these up and give it a go. The spiel says something like "for up to 24 hours, you can erase it, then it becomes permanent". I will test this out, but what are anyone else's experiences with them? Worth it, or just a gimmick?

I'm not SO old school that I still buy screentone and use an exacto-knife, that is a chore best left to programs that can fill patterns or do Computones. Anyway, a goodly supply of tones is significantly more expensive than MangaStudio 4 EX, and needs to be replenished. No thanks, I'll go with MS 4EX.

I avoid colored pencils for several reasons, like never having the color I need because I used it up, the pigment breaks ALL the time, or it doesn't interact well with the paper I'm using.

Inking is a whole 'nother thing, and we could talk about that if there's interest. It would probably be better served in another thread though.

We could also talk about paper types, but that's also probably a subject for another thread.

[Remmirath]

I'm afraid I've little of use to add. I far prefer drawing on paper to drawing on the computer, and also typically use a 0.5mm mechanical pencil. I don't usually do anything that requires inking (although perhaps I would be better off inking things before painting them), so I haven't experimented with either red or blue lead. I never heard of the liquid lead, either.

I know that, in Photoshop, you can select any one particular colour and replace it or select any particular colour and delete it. That ought to work with any colour, not just red, though; it's probable that what you heard about is something else that I'm not aware of.

I do sometimes use coloured pencils, but mixing colours with them never seems to turn out well and I don't have a very wide range of them, so I usually use something else if I want colour.

[Winter_Wolf]

I know that, in Photoshop, you can select any one particular colour and replace it or select any particular colour and delete it. That ought to work with any colour, not just red, though; it's probable that what you heard about is something else that I'm not aware of.

I actually have no idea how to do it as I never thought to try. For all I know it could be as simple as selecting the red channel and deleting it. "They" probably neglected the inevitable touch up work required. If there's a way to get good results without having to do touch up work, I'd love to hear about it!

Liquid pencil is, as far as I know, only done by Sharpie brand. I just bought a couple in a bubble pack today, so I'm going to give it a try. We'll see if it can handle subtle lines and light vs heavy pressure, I guess. Hopefully it's erasable in the way normal pencils are instead of the way the ink in erasable pens is.

As to red and blue, those are the only two alternate color leads I know of that people use, I'm going to give the red a try because it is locally available and the blue is not. Otherwise it's internet mail order and leads like to break in the jostle of shipping.

[BraveSirKevin]

Today I read that if you're using a scanner, you can use red lead in much the same way as blue by applying a filter or something (I'm kind of sketchy on this point) in Photoshop.

The technique is pretty straight-forward:
1. Scan your artwork. Do this in full colour. This should automatically make it RGB, but if you have a fancy scanner you might have to tell it to choose RGB over CMYK.


2. Go to the channels pallette. Select the Blue Channel (if you used a blue pencil. Red for a red or pink or yellow pencil)


3. Select Grayscale from the Mode submenu under Image. Say yes when it asks if you'd like to discard the other channels.


4. You're done! You can apply Levels and other filters to get the image looking as clean as you want it to. If you mean to colour it after, be sure to switch back to RGB again first.


This technique will also help you out with the trouble you have with inking. You can scan your original drawing, convert it to blue and print it out. You then ink the blue line print out and scan it back in and clean it up using this technique.

What about lead holders? This is essentially a sheath that holds lead, 2mm seeming to be common. There's regular lead, blue "lead" and red "lead". Anyone used any of these?

Lead holders are essentially just the big brother of the mechanical pencils you're used to. They have all the same upsides as a woodbound pencil, and a lot of the downsides including the fact that they need to be sharpened. They do have one very important upside though, and that is that they don't get shorter! I love my traditional pencils, but they're virtually useless to me once they're less than 3 inches long and they get that short very quickly when I'm working on a big project. If you're comfortable with your old mechanical pencil, I'd say stick with it... Lead holders can be a bit of a chore with all of the sharpening. The main benefits would be that you can buy better grades of lead for the holders than you can for the mechanical pencil, and that you have a little more control of your line weights. You can get thicker lines, and you can actually get much finer ones too. If you go for a harder lead (I favour 4H, but 2H is more common) then you can sharpen it to an insane point and it won't blunt nearly as quickly as an HB would.

And then there's the liquid pencil. I haven't tried one yet, but as I've lost my last good mechanical pencil I have to go replace it tomorrow, and I'm thinking about picking one of these up and give it a go. The spiel says something like "for up to 24 hours, you can erase it, then it becomes permanent". I will test this out, but what are anyone else's experiences with them? Worth it, or just a gimmick?

Liquid pencils are basically pens that have a special ink made up of rubber cement and graphite. The end result looks like pencil work (sort of) and while you're working it's erasable like a pencil, but only for a very short while. Other than that it feels a lot more like working with a pen. You'd have a real tough time if you're a sketcher like me because the pressure of the stroke doesn't really influence the lightness/darkness of the stroke. It's really more of a finishing tool than a sketching one.

Not sure if this is helpful to you or not, but I'm quite happy to answer any other questions you may have.

[Winter_Wolf]

Well I picked up a pack of liquid pencil. Turns out I couldn't buy just one, they come in double packs. It also turns out, they're quite a bit less useful than either pencil or a pen. The nicest thing I can say about them is that the eraser did erase the marks. However that's offset by the fact that I had to push pretty hard to get a dark line out of them, and there were a lot of breaks in the line and some pockets of clotted graphite-and-rubber. My verdict: definitely a gimmick, and only slightly more useful than a defective pen.

BraveSirKevin, thanks for the step by step on the photoshop color stripping. I'll have to try it out soon. Turns out I really like the mechanical pencil red "lead" and will probably end up online ordering a few containers of the blue type. The red is just a little bit strong.

I elected not to buy a lead holder today because I can wrangle 40% discounts on that and some premium drawing paper by waiting a few days. From what you've said about the lead holder, it sounds like something I can work with. I was always sad when my Tombow HBs got nubby. Do you have a recommended brand, or are they all "more or less the same"? The only locally available lead holder is a Staedtler Mars 2mm for USD $8+.

[Hiro Protagonest]

Well, there are graphics tablets (not to be confused with those other tablets) that use styluses (styli?) for drawing.

[BraveSirKevin]

BraveSirKevin, thanks for the step by step on the photoshop color stripping.

You're very welcome! Always happy to help a fellow artist

I elected not to buy a lead holder today because I can wrangle 40% discounts on that and some premium drawing paper by waiting a few days. From what you've said about the lead holder, it sounds like something I can work with. I was always sad when my Tombow HBs got nubby. Do you have a recommended brand, or are they all "more or less the same"? The only locally available lead holder is a Staedtler Mars 2mm for USD $8+.

The make of holder is a lot less important than the lead that you put into it. The Staedler Mars one should be pretty good though. I bought one of those almost 20 years ago and I still use it today. Even a cheap knock off version would be okay though... Just test it to make sure the lead doesn't slip before you buy it.

Well, there are graphics tablets (not to be confused with those other tablets) that use styluses (styli?) for drawing.

I love graphics tablets and I use one almost everyday! Mostly for colouring and also for quick sketching. They're also especially good for digital painting. That said, if I'm going to draw something "important" I almost always do the final rendering on paper with a 4h pencil. This is really just preference, but I find I get much better line work doing it the old fashioned way. Cross hatching and render lines also just work a lot better when I do them the traditional way. I just can't get the same look out of them when I'm drawing with the stylus

[Winter_Wolf]

Been meaning to ask, why do you prefer a 4H pencil? I found them to be difficult to work with, the lines were always so faint (I don't have great eyesight). Or do you use it mainly for when you're going to ink over it? I could kind of see that.

The red mechanical pencil lead is growing on me pretty quick, it's just a bit of a shame that it's so expensive and I really HAVE to order online if I want to use them regularly. The 4 regular plus one red container packs would break my bank pretty quickly and I'd be up to my eyeballs HB 0.5mm lead.

Dragging my heels on ordering leads and a lead holder, been eyeballing a new Intuos tablet and trying to decide where my money's best spent.

[BraveSirKevin]

Been meaning to ask, why do you prefer a 4H pencil? I found them to be difficult to work with, the lines were always so faint (I don't have great eyesight). Or do you use it mainly for when you're going to ink over it? I could kind of see that.

The short version is that I use 4H lead on my final linework when I'm doing stuff in a comic book style like this:

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Link to Bigger Version.

For the initial sketching and stuff I tend to use a 2B, because the soft lead allows me to get a usable line just by lightly brushing the pencil over the page. Between that and the fact that I don't sharpen my B pencils to a very sharp point, the page doesn't get dented so I can easily erase it without leaving the slightest mark. This is pretty important because I don't have a clue what's meant to be on the page so there's going to be a lot of sketching and erasing while I work out exactly what's meant to go where, and how the composition is meant to work.

The final rendering is a very different process, with very different requirements. I've worked out all the basic compostion, proportion, perspective and shading in the rough stage so that's no longer a concern... I'm now only interested in getting perfectly clean line work down. I find a 4H lead perfect for this for a few reasons:
• I can sharpen it to a finer point than I can get with a softer lead, so it's perfect for all of the detailing.
• It holds the point longer than a softer lead would, so I don't need to sharpen it as often.
• It's so light that it's virtually invisible if I don't press hard, so when I do need to do a little sketching to work out where a line needs to go, I won't need to erase it later and risk messing up the parts I've already finished.
• It's quite dark if I do press hard. Every line that's drawn in a final rendering is going to be deliberate and commited to the paper, so there's nothing wrong with pressing hard and denting the paper. Most of my final lines do actually cut right into the page, so when I do need to erase some sketchy lines, the deliberate ones stay behind.
• Finally, because it's a "clean pencils" version of the artwork, I don't need the line work to be black. I can make it black in photoshop, or I can ink over it. The grey is just fine because the quality and crispness of the line is a lot more important than the darkness of it.

The red mechanical pencil lead is growing on me pretty quick, it's just a bit of a shame that it's so expensive and I really HAVE to order online if I want to use them regularly. The 4 regular plus one red container packs would break my bank pretty quickly and I'd be up to my eyeballs HB 0.5mm lead.

Haha! :D if you think drawing's expensive, you should try oil painting some time! I have no idea how painters make a profit because those materials do not come cheaply.

Dragging my heels on ordering leads and a lead holder, been eyeballing a new Intuos tablet and trying to decide where my money's best spent.

A new one? Do you mean you already have one? If not, you should definitely get one... an Intuous is really worth the money in my opinion.

[Winter_Wolf]

• It's so light that it's virtually invisible if I don't press hard, so when I do need to do a little sketching to work out where a line needs to go, I won't need to erase it later and risk messing up the parts I've already finished.
• It's quite dark if I do press hard. Every line that's drawn in a final rendering is going to be deliberate and commited to the paper, so there's nothing wrong with pressing hard and denting the paper. Most of my final lines do actually cut right into the page, so when I do need to erase some sketchy lines, the deliberate ones stay behind.

So you redo everything from scratch, as it were? No light box? I've never used a light box, but I tend to work single pages unless I doodle a really, really great sketch on terrible paper (why is it all my best work ends up on freaking lined paper?!) My notebooks from college were probably 5% actual class notes and the rest doodles and sketches, whereas my art sketchbooks generally held all my least successful drawings and sketches. Irony is a bitch.

Haha! :D if you think drawing's expensive, you should try oil painting some time! I have no idea how painters make a profit because those materials do not come cheaply.

I used to be an art major before I went astray. Now I'm just a hobbyist. I know how bad it gets. Oils--well paints in general--are such a mixed bag, it's one of the reasons I turned to trying digital art. It's just not the same, but then again I don't have to spend a half hour setting things up just so, or a half hour cleaning up after I'm done for the day. All said and done, though, I still prefer pencils and inks and black/white/gray palette.

A new one? Do you mean you already have one? If not, you should definitely get one... an Intuous is really worth the money in my opinion.

I meant new Intuos as opposed to old Graphire3. I have some concerns about nib life, though. On the other hand, it's possible (though maybe not likely) that this textured drawing surface I keep hearing about would make it easier to control my lines. I early on developed the bad habit of needing to look at my hands when I draw, and it's always a little awkward to have to look at the monitor and trust my hands to do what I want them to do. Sadly I don't know anyone who has one so I could test drive it for a few days. If I had five or ten times as much money, it'd be a Cintiq no question about it.

[BraveSirKevin]

So you redo everything from scratch, as it were? No light box? I've never used a light box, but I tend to work single pages unless I doodle a really, really great sketch on terrible paper (why is it all my best work ends up on freaking lined paper?!) My notebooks from college were probably 5% actual class notes and the rest doodles and sketches, whereas my art sketchbooks generally held all my least successful drawings and sketches. Irony is a bitch.

I use a lightbox, yes.. If I can't be bothered with that and the only one seeing it will be me, then I'll make a blue-line version of the rough in Photoshop and print it out and draw on top of that instead. Some times I'll just erase my rough in sections and draw on the same page. Some times, but very rarely, I'll start from scratch and use the rough only as a guide.

I used to be an art major before I went astray. Now I'm just a hobbyist. I know how bad it gets. Oils--well paints in general--are such a mixed bag, it's one of the reasons I turned to trying digital art. It's just not the same, but then again I don't have to spend a half hour setting things up just so, or a half hour cleaning up after I'm done for the day. All said and done, though, I still prefer pencils and inks and black/white/gray palette.

My issue with paint is all of the set up before, and all of the clean up after. Also, they're expensive! I do almost any colour work digitally now and the only time I ever really pick up a paintbrush is when I'm painting my minis.

I meant new Intuos as opposed to old Graphire3. I have some concerns about nib life, though. On the other hand, it's possible (though maybe not likely) that this textured drawing surface I keep hearing about would make it easier to control my lines. I early on developed the bad habit of needing to look at my hands when I draw, and it's always a little awkward to have to look at the monitor and trust my hands to do what I want them to do. Sadly I don't know anyone who has one so I could test drive it for a few days. If I had five or ten times as much money, it'd be a Cintiq no question about it.

I'm still using an Intuous 3, so I can't really comment on the surface of the newer models. I do imagine that a textured surface would tear through nibs rapidly though, and would take a fair bit of wear and tear itself, meaning lots of extra expense in the long run.

[Winter_Wolf]

Did you build your lightbox, or buy one? I'm curious because it might be helpful for things like testing out stuff like beard/no beard without having to fire up the slowpoke computer that has the scanner connected to it, but not sure if it's the kind of thing I would want to spend much money on setting up, especially as it seems like in my case it would be highly situational.

[BraveSirKevin]

Mine was made by my dad almost 2 decades ago, and I inherited it when he no longer had use for it.

It's basically a low profile, but very large wooden box (10cm tall, a meter and a half long, and a meter wide, but most people wouldn't need one that big). Internals are lined with reflective foil to get the most out of the light which is provided by a pair of standard flourescent tubes. The electronics are the same as the set up that you'd find in a standard flourescent light fitting, but with an AC power cord that you plug into the wall. The clear glass drawing surface is supported by a thick sheet of translucent white perspex which also helps with light diffusion.

If your main purpose is to just try out variations from time to time without destroying your existing pieces, you might be better off just investing in a pad of tracing paper.

[Winter_Wolf]

I went and got a 2mm lead holder, fiddled with it for a day (drawing), and promptly forgot about it. It may well be that if I'm going to be using it I need to drop in something in the 1H-4H lead range. It's just easier to grab my (kind of) color coded mechanical pencils. It would be a bit better if I actually had blue mechanical pencils for blue leads and red for red, but they were only selling the black ones when I went to the store. Plus I have a blunted graphite stick (6mm with lacquered coating) that covers more area with soft edges for my shading. I'm quite happy that I got .5mm red and blue leads from Blick Art online. Great discounts for buying a dozen containers at a time.

My next chore is finding proper smooth archive-quality paper that isn't bristol board. The local art supply store doesn't sell what I'm looking for, and I suspect that the pad I owned (which is now 4500 miles away) I got in Anchorage, AK. The paper I have lets my pens bleed way too much. Nothing like losing a crisp edge on detail work because of ink bleed. Luckily it was a "rustic" piece so the look works.