These are the supplies I generally carry around with me. Sometimes I carry the drawing board on the bottom, but not usually. Here’s what they are:
1. A fairly cheap 11×14 inch sketchbook I got somewhere. I’m extremely rough on my sketchbooks, and the spine was coming apart at the corner so I taped it up. The tape is coming off now. I put stickers on it for identification purposes when in a big pile of my and my roommate’s sketchbooks.
2. My trusty “ArtBox.” I’ve had this for about ten years or so. It holds a bunch of stuff. It’s got stickers for the Insomniacs and the Suicide Machines on it because I was totally punk rock in college, yo.
3. I don’t know why I’ve got these sharpies. I don’t really use sharpies for anything other than labeling DVDs and stuff. But they were in the ArtBox, so in the photo they go! I also carry around a utility knife for trimming paper and stabbing hobos. I try to remember to take that out of the box when I ride on airplanes.
4. A 12-inch “C-Thru” aluminum ruler with a cork back and an inking edge. It is decidedly not see-through, but it gets the job done.
5. Eraser brush! I try to keep this with me to battle the scourge of eraser gribblies. Otherwise the gribblies get ground into the paper and all over my pants and nobody’s happy.
6. Pencils! I’ve currently got two “crimson red” Col-Erase, one non-photo blue Col-Erase, a very shiny holographic pencil that seems to have come from Puget Sound Electrical, a regular old HB .5mm mechanical pencil, and my dearest love, a 4H Tombow Homo-graph.
I use the red pencils for sketching, mostly. I like the smoother feel of them, it loosens me up. I use the blue one for drawing perspective grids, and pretty much only for drawing perspective grids. I don’t use the shiny pencil for anything, but it’s awful shiny. The mechanical I use for laying out panel borders and for finishing red-pencil drawings on occasion. I use the 4H for almost everything else, because I like how light the pencils are– I barely have to erase at all.
The mechanical and the 4H have those pads on them because I grip my pencils way too tight and it helps soothe my tender fingertips. Since those two are the pencils I use the most, they’re the only ones with the pads.
7. Pens! Pens from many lands. Up at the top is my Pentel Pocket Brush Pen, which I have previously hailed as mankind’s greatest invention. I love it desperately. Also nice is that the non-refillable cartridges are easily refillable with Rapidograph ink. Since I haven’t used my Rapidographs in six or seven years, it’s nice to have something to do with that ink.
I carry a large contingent of Micron pens as well. I have them in the Graphic 1, 08, 05, and 03 sizes. I don’t generally use anything smaller. I have two of most of them, since I like to have a fresh one and one that’s starting to dry out, since the line quality changes as the ink runs out. You can get a little more line variation out of a semi-dry one, so I like those best. In order to keep straight which one is which, (and also because I have sweaty, sweaty hands and the labels get smudged off in short order) I put a little label on a piece of masking tape at the end of each marker so I know which is which. The current lineup:
Graphic 1 - “Liner” I only have one of these at a time because I only use them for ruling panel borders anyway.
08 new - “Don Piano”
08 dry - “Gut”
05 new - hmm, I haven’t labeled this one yet.
05 dry - “Dodongo”
03 dry- “O.G.” I need to get a new one of these.
I also have a Uni-Ball vision micro. I don’t really use it, but it’s good for sketching sometimes.
8. Erasers, white-out and a pencil sharpener. I’ve got a few different Magic Rub erasers. For some reason they all have different consistencies and work well for different jobs. I dunno. I use all of them. I like the white-out with the little wedge brush. I don’t use it all that often but it’s nice to have. People tell me it’s bad and stuff but it works for me. I just picked up that pencil sharpener yesterday for seventy-nine cents, and it works very nicely. I had one of those little metal ones, but the blades got dull and it didn’t have any way to catch the shavings. I like this one better.
Oh, there’s also a pad of Bristol I forgot to mention. I like the Strathmore series 400, but it’s impossible to find in pads here in Portland, so I pick up the 300 series pads for on-the-go work. I have to buy the 400 in 22×30 inch single sheets, and those aren’t very portable.
