I have a confession to make. A lot of yesterday’s page wasn’t done with a Japanese horse hair brush. That should be obvious given some of the more refined lines I’ll pulling this week. What happened? I went on vacation.
I visited my parents and brother in Colorado. My brother is a coal miner, which is a more important job than making web comics, but that’s another subject. Anyways, when I’m on vacation, I try to still work on the road. In this case, I took along some drawing board and penciled some RATFIST pages on the plane!
I also remembered getting this Japanese fountain pen, only
instead of a metal nib, it had a replaceable brush nib! I figured the line was probably going to be jacked up, but how much worse could it be than my horsehair/bamboo brush?
The results surprised me. It’s a REALLY nice brush pen! I don’t know the name of the manufacturer, but it’s a pretty pricey pen. It was a give from my Japanese business partners some 12 years ago. I hadn’t opened the box, but kept it in my studio to remember them. But when I popped on one of the cartridges, the ink flowed and the brush worked almost as good as my Windsor Newton Series 7s. The tip looked synthetic (it was white hair) but worked more like sable.
I inked a week’s worth of pages right there on my parent’s living room coffee table.
We’ll get back to the rougher style of brush work later in the story, don’t think I’m selling out and going all tight on you. Let this be a symbol that I’m using Ratfist as an excuse to experiment with medium, story and character. It’s what a web comic is all about in my view.
