Liz Baillie



Comics: My Brain Hurts
Website: www.lizbaillie.com
Making comics since year of: I've been drawing comics since I was a little kid, but I've only been drawing them in any serious way with publication as the intent since 1998.
Art education/schools attended: BFA, School of Visual Arts class of 2002 (cartooning major).

Tools

Pencils: 0.5mm mechanical pencils with HB lead. I hate taking time to sharpen pencils over and over and mechanical pencils give a consistent line without needing to be sharpened, so everybody wins!

Inks: PH Martin's TECH ink is the greatest but also hardest to find ink. A close second is PH Martin's Black Star Hi-Carb, which is more matte and less shiny, but I like shiny things. Both can be very difficult to find, but worth the hunt.

Brushes: I don't use any traditional brushes at all, but I do use Faber-Castell PITT brush pens like they are going out of style. I'm just not a brush person.

Pens: I mostly use these Japanese nibs I get from New York Central Art Supply and the label is only in Japanese so I don't know what they're called. They are almost exactly the same as these other nibs I also use made by Deleter. They're the equivalent of Deleter brand maru pens and I also occasionally use the Deleter G-pens for fatter lines. The maru nibs are a lot like the traditional Hunt 102 nibs but they are a far higher quality and unlike the Hunt nibs, I have never encountered a problem with a random faulty nib. If you Google "deleter nib" you'll come up with a bunch of sites that sell them.

Paper: Using the pen nibs I use, I've found that a bristol vellum works well for me. I work on 9"x12" paper and it is eventually reduced to 5" x8.5".

Lettering: Faber-Castell PITT pens size "F". I prefer PITT pens to Microns because they do not bleed as much and the quality of the ink is much blacker and richer.

Color: I haven't done much color, but when I have it's been in Photoshop. I've also done a bit of watercolor and when I've done that, I've also used Caren D'Ache watercolor pencils in combination with the actual watercolor, for added texture. When I do that I use watercolor paper because bristol doesn't take the paint very well.

Layout/ Composition: When I am putting together a story, I always start with an outline that includes the beginning, middle, and end, along with any other pertinent details. From there, I write up a script and try to figure out how much information will be on each page so I know how many pages it will be. Then I do thumbnails in my sketchbook and when I finish those, I move on to the pencils and inks.

Convention Sketches (when different from illustrations done in the studio): Always Faber-Castell PITT brush pens and/or regular PITT pens in sizes S,F and M.

Tool timeline, starting from when you began drawing in any serious way until the present, and what spurred the changes: The first comic I ever drew with the intent to publish it was (believe it or not) blue ballpoint pen on looseleaf paper. When I learned about Hunt 102 nibs I got some of those along with some Higgins ink, because both are the easiest to find and I didn't know any better. I had horrible luck with the Hunt 102 nibs (they would catch and splatter and other terrible things) but I kept plugging away with them until I gave up and submitted to Microns and Rapidographs. The Rapidos were too annoying to clean and the Microns bled and looked terrible, so I started using the Japanese nibs on a teacher's recommendation. I was never happy with the Higgins ink and experimenting with different inks led me to my love of PH Martin's TECH, which is a very rich, black ink that still runs through my nibs fairly well. I also use the aforementioned PITT brush pens for filling in blacks and for fatter lines on closeups. I started using those when I was experimenting with non-nib pens and wanted to get away from Microns and I've been very happy with them.

What tools you'd never use, and why: Sharpies (they are highly acidic and will ruin your paper over time, not to mention the black *will* fade significantly over not too much time and turn brownish. In short, they are totally non-archival. Also the line quality with a Sharpie is horrendous.), Microns (similar reasons, plus they bleed), Hunt 102 nibs (call me a heretic, but I've tasted the fruits of paradise with Deleter nibs and I'm never going back). Higgins ink (it's crap, plain and simple), any non-waterproof ink (you never know when water will suddenly spill all over your pages you worked on for days).

And lastly, any advice you'd like to give: You may not think your pages are worth saving now, but you never know what the future will hold. Take very good care of all your original comic pages and try to use archival tools whenever possible. And don't cut up your original art for any reason (I made that mistake once... it's a long story, don't do it).

Grant Reynolds

Comics: Smaller Parts, To the Mouth of the Source, Orangedirt
Website: http://www.grantreynolds.net/
Making comics since year of: At least since around 4th grade, sooo... 1989-ish. But I would say that I actually started self-publishing them as zines around 1995, and really started to take them seriously around 1998.
Art education/schools attended: School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Tools

Pencils: Non-photo blue. I've heard that there are mechanical blue pencils, but I have yet to find them. Well, actually, I haven't really looked, but they sound wonderful. My friend Ezra supposedly uses them.

Inks: As in brush and ink? No, not really.

Brushes: Brush pens sometimes, just to fill in large areas, or to sometimes get a rougher edge on something, but never really brushes.

Pens: I only use Alvin Penstix No. 3015-EF 0.5 mm. I discovered them quite by accident when cleaning out lockers at my school. At first Pearl Paints was the only place that carried them in Chicago, but they were always out of stock and refused to order them for me or tell me when they would be getting more in stock, so I ended up ordering them online from Dick Blick. Then a Blick store opened up downtown, and they always have them, so that's where I go now.

Paper: Vellum bristol cause it has a bit of a tooth, and I've found that the smooth kind will smudge a little with the pens I use. No particular brand, just whatever fits my budget.

Lettering: This is always on a case-by-case basis. I love to use cursive when I can, which is an influence from my Grandma Benjamin, whose birthday cards to me are so beautifully handwritten. Large blocks of text, like say for the liners of a CD are pretty awful to do cause I get hand cramps, but otherwise I feel that I have a pretty clean style. Sometimes I use different fonts, or just upper and lower case, to differentiate between characters' word balloons. I used to worry a lot about whether it was clean enough, or too sloppy, but after seeing some of Chris Ware's huge original pages in a gallery I realized that his hand was a little shakey, too, but that it still came out looking nice. Now I don't really worry about it at all.

Color: Color is something I'm still getting used to. I've always just sort of worked in b&w, but the more illustration and freelance work I do the more I have to dabble with color, because that's what people always want, so it's definitely something I know that I need to work on. It's very difficult to color my work on a computer because of all the detail and my hatching technique. Also, I often leave lines with little breaks in them, so whenever I try to fill in areas with color on the computer they leak out into other areas. It takes a lot of time, but the end result is always worth it.

Layout/ Composition: This is all very intuitive, so I'm not too sure what to say. I guess that lately I'm very drawn to symmetricality, so that's something that I'm very consciously playing with. Also, I'm extremely influenced by the Chicago Imagists/Hairy Who movement, and have subsequently inherited their horror vacui, which is a kind of fear of empty spaces. Basically, I'm always filling in every little area. Sometimes drawing a sparse panel is very difficult for me. Artists like Jordan Crane amaze me with their sparse yet affective panels.

Convention Sketches (when different from illustrations done in the studio): I don't do too many sketches for comics, because I feel like it bloats the process of making them, although I do fill up my sketchbooks with non-comics related material rather quickly. Probably about one sketchbook every two months. I think I'm around like, seventy-five or so right now. Sometimes though sketches for a comic are a must, so in that case I usually just do a quick one that's really bad, that gives me all the details and dimensions I need. I really don't like redrawing something, because usually I get it the way I want it the first time.

Tool timeline, starting from when you began drawing in any serious way until the present, and what spurred the changes: I started out using a ball point pen and standard copy paper, then made the traditional evolutionary leaps that many seem to make to those V5 pens and Microns. But I'm very hard on my materials, so I would always begin to have problems, like the V5 would start getting leaky, or the Micron's tip would get bent. The Alvin Penstix seem to take my abuse rather well, but still I go through them pretty quickly so I have to buy them in bulk.

What tools you'd never use, and why: I'm not a big fan of computer graphics in comics. Like light spots and making things gleam. It's really quite like cheating, because if you look at the actual line work on a lot of the new superhero comics they're very badly drawn. It's just all the fancy computer magic that make the kids go ‘oooh’ and ‘ahhh.’

And lastly, any advice you'd like to give: When you're just getting started it's more important to make as much work as possible than to worry about whether that work is good or not. What I mean is, all the stuff like style and storytelling will figure itself out in time. The more you just do it the more quickly and easier it will come. Experience, more than anything else, is going to make you better -- not what pens or paper or other materials you're using. And when you're finished with it don't put it in your desk, put it out. It's important to get feedback, and to see your comic as a finished product. Put it somewhere like Quimby's Comics to sell. It'll make you feel good, y'know.