Like many artists I flit from one thing to the next trying to find just the right combination of drawing medium and tool.

I have used .5 blue mechanical lead in a Pentel Twist Erase III (My favorite mechanical pencil by the way. It comes in .5, .7 and .9 it is padded and comfortably thick to reduce hand strain and it has an 1.5" replaceable eraser.)

I bought a bunch of Col-erase pencils and still use them for certain things but they didn't trip my trigger as much as many other people I have talked to.

I have used various hardness' of lead in a variety of sizes from .3 to .9 and up to that used in a lead holder.

I liked the .3 but the lead broke easily and it didn't allow for the expressive lines you can get with thicker lead. The Lead Holder was good but didn't travel very well. The pointer always ended up a huge mess. Bleh. The .9 could do the expressive lines but detail work was no good when working at a small size.

For inking I use Copic Multiiners of various sizes. That is one of the few things that hasn't been in a constant flux.

Traditionally I have used the cheap 4 dollar sketchbooks that you can get at Wal-Mart but of course the paper doesn't take ink very well. After talking with a little while he mentioned that he used standard copy paper because it was very white and didn't yellow.

I tried it but found myself messing up the paper before I was done sketching. So I started looking around for something similar but able to do what I needed it to...

Around the same time i was hanging out with an artist friend of mine and I saw him use sand paper to sharpen a Lead Holders contents to a chisel point. Obvious perhaps but i had never seen it done before. I ended up trying the trick on a .9 mechanical pencil and REALLY liked it.


SO. The materials I am using at the moment are:

.9 Twist-erase III mechanical pencil with 2B lead.
Copic Multiliners and Markers
HP Premium Choice Laser (32 lbs) paper