Many people who do cartoons or ink outlines to their pencil sketches often use mechanical/technical ink pens (shown below), also called ‘liner’ pens.
While I do use these myself, I thought I’d show the difference that using a brush pen can make.
Brush pens come in different shapes, sizes, and makes. The one I use is shown left and is a Pentel Water Brush. Normally you fill it with water and use it with watercolour paints/pencils, but I fill mine with Indian ink and use it for cartoon/illustration work. You can also buy a ‘brush-pen’ which comes with ink refills, but I find the water brush more cost effective and I can fill it with whichever brand of ink that I prefer.
Technical/mechanical pens give a constant line thickness, this is handy if your an architect drawing out house plans, but not when it comes to cartooning/illustrative work, you want your lines to be of varying thickness to make it look less-technical.
Shown below is the same character drawn four times. You can click the image below to see a larger version.
The top left head was drawn with a 0.1 Liner Pen. Top right was a 08 Liner Pen. Bottom left was drawn with only the brush pen, and bottom right is the 0.1 Liner for the eyes, nose and ears, with the brush pen for the rest. The top two heads are, for my tastes, too even. There’s just not enough variation in the lines. Bottom left is better, but it is quite difficult to draw circles with the brush pen as when you are drawing a circle/arc the brush tip will give you a thicker line on the curve, hence why the bottom arc of the eyes are thicker and darker than the upper arc of the eyes. Combining the 0.1 and the brush pen gives a much nicer look. I use the liner for arcs that I want to stay even and less noticeable, so I used it on the outline of the eyes, the eyeballs and the nose – brush pen for the rest.
If you don’t have a brush pen and want to try this out, you can use an ordinary paint brush and ink, but be aware that it can take a bit of practice to get used to using a brush as a pen.
