The beauty of pen and ink

By its very nature, pen and ink hand-drawing is one of the oldest forms of illustration. Ed Ricketts talks to some of its most fervent modern practitioners

Digital illustration is here to stay, but there are still many for whom a piece of paper and a pen offer far more illustrative delights than all the pixel-pushing tools in the world. A new wave of back-to-basics illustrators is challenging the ultra-slick, ultra-polished look of modern digital processes – and while for some this may be a conscious reaction to current trends, for most it’s simply the atavistic pleasure of making marks that appeals.Johanna Basford describes herself as an “ink evangelist”, and her intricate, mostly monochrome hand-drawn illustrations are certainly a testament to that. Previous clients have included H&M, Creative Review, Absolut Vodka and Tate Modern; right now she’s about to embark on a two-day live draw event for Smart Car, creating on-vehicle illustrations based on suggestions sent via Twitter, with the whole thing being streamed live.

It’s the sort of thing that Basford revels in, and has done ever since her days at university. “When I was in my final year of Textile Design at art school, our department got its first digital printer,” she says. “Suddenly everyone started working in CAD, using digital photographs or vector-based designs and digitally printing them in every imaginable Pantone. I wanted to do something different, so I dug out some pens and pencils and started drawing a super-intricate design, which I could then silk-screenprint by hand in black and white.
“I loved drawing, getting my hands dirty and making something that was tactile and rich. Clicking a mouse and pressing Print just doesn’t hold the same charm for me.”
When Basford’s not doodling on cars, she usually works with pen and ink. A typical illustration doesn’t involve much planning beyond the basic layout, as she prefers to simply start drawing and see how it evolves from there. Beginning with pencil – “I use a pink Hello Kitty pencil that my boyfriend brought back from a trip to Tokyo” – she draws a sketch at roughly double the size of the final print, so she can later reduce it in Photoshop.
“After I’ve completed the pencil drawing, I work directly over the graphite lines in ink,” Basford continues. “I usually use Staedtler pigment liners – a 0.2 and 0.05 are my most used nib sizes. As well as going over the pencil outlines, I add detailing, crosshatching and any little areas of filled black that occupy the negative space. When the image is completely inked in, I gently erase the pencil lines. For murals or hand-drawn canvases I’ll use Poscas, for custom-inked Converse trainers I use Sharpie Rub-a-Dub markers, and for white-on-black work I use X-ray markers,” she adds.
Finally, the image is scanned into Photoshop, and then re-sized and edited to remove fingerprints and other detritus. If colour is needed, Basford adds it using layers in much the same way as a screenprinting process. The entire procedure can take anything from two days to a week, depending on complexity. “Hand-drawing isn’t fast and there’s no Undo command,” she explains. “For me, though, the hand-penned line captures a sense of character that a vector-based alternative can’t compete with.”
While Basford has nothing but admiration for talented digital artists, the idea of creating an image digitally and then deliberately adding blemishes to emulate a hand-drawn look just doesn’t appeal. “For me, hand-drawn work has a look and feel that’s inherently unique,” she says. “I love the tactile nature of ‘real’ materials, the craft of creating something by hand, and having a messy ink-splattered studio space.”
Sarah Coleman, aka Inkymole, has rightly become famous for her intricate hand-drawn illustration and typography, and boasts an enormous range of clients, from advertising and editorial to fashion, and even bespoke tattoo designs. When we speak, she is working on two ads, some point-ofsale for Crabtree & Evelyn, a logo and 11 covers, including one for a book about hand-lettering – proving, if nothing else, that pen and ink is very much in demand in 2011.
It all stems from her dad, Coleman says, who would produce titles for the cine films he made – not something that was particularly common in the 70s due to the time and money involved. “He had some original Witch – short for ‘William Mitchell’ – pens, and he lent them to me with his bottle of Quink,” she explains. “I still use them to this day. I think he thought he’d get them back at some point,” she laughs.
Coleman’s design process is resolutely analogue. She first sketches on Fabriano 200gsm recycled acid-free paper, then completes the drawing with Ecoline Black or Quink and coloured inks. It can be a time-consuming process; for one current cover, Coleman has just produced her seventh pencil sketch, while on an older project she reached a staggering 46 versions of almost-finished work.
The image is then scanned, using custom settings to preserve as much detail as possible, in order to send to the client. “If something is being blown up large for a big poster headline – such as the Crabtree & Evelyn headlines I’m working on now – I’ll vectorise it carefully with one of my custom settings, so that every lump and bump of the line is preserved,” Coleman adds.
Coleman achieves this mainly by using Live Trace within Illustrator, with alternate settings for projects where the image needs to look as if it was actually created with vectors from the start. “The only thing a vector won’t retain is any wash or change of saturation where I’ve applied the ink,” she says. “If that’s important, I’ll try to talk the client out of a vector final, and encourage them to go with a Photoshop TIFF. I use a lot of Multiply and Overlay layers to build up texture – real textures scanned in from my collection – and I’ll often be found Patch tooling a juicy area of a texture, or burning and dodging in an area where perhaps I have type over the top and need to give the whole thing some oomph.”
Colour, if needed, may be added by hand or later in the digital process, depending on how short the deadline is and how much the colour scheme is likely to change. “I also frequently work solely with coloured felt tip pens, which is a real brain-releaser in that it’s a one-take deal, straight out onto the paper,” she says. “No digital trickery!”
A self-confessed pen geek, Coleman gets equally excited about new pens and new software features. “My Wacom pen sits next to my nib pens. One is neither superior nor more valid than the other – they’re all part of the same gang, and what’s the purpose of a gang? To get the job done, together.”
Izzie Klingels, a British artist now living in Seattle, was also influenced by the lure of pen and ink from an early age. “I’ve always loved Milton Glaser’s pen and ink drawings,” she says. “My mum bought me his book when I was a teenager and that made a huge impression on me. I also had a Ralph Steadman print of an Alice in Wonderland illustration that really inspired me and I love Erte, David Hockney’s ink drawings, Guido Crepax and Aubrey Beardsley,” she continues.
After founding Lazy Eye – working with film and video – and, later, women’s fanzine Hey Ladies together with a group of friends, Klingels now works in both motion/ video and illustration. “I had five new pieces in a group show called The Menagerie at Art Work Space Gallery, at The Hempel hotel in London in May,” she says. “I’ve also recently been designing T-shirts for an LA brand and working on a design for a skateboard, but probably the biggest project for me this year, I would say, has been launching my own line of greeting cards and paper goods, Les Yeux d’Extase,” she reflects.
Unusually, Klingels’ illustrated work consists of thousands and thousands of dots, painstakingly arranged into forms, shading and lines in the style of the Impressionists or Pointillists. This, she says, wasn’t a particularly conscious choice, but simply the way she began to illustrate and which has continued ever since. “I’m not really sure why I decided to use dots, but from then on it became my primary technique – although I dabble in others, I always seem to come back to it,” Klingels explains. “I love the softness and depth it produces. For me that texture corresponds with the grain of old black-and-white film, and I think that was what I was really trying to emulate: 16mm film, or the 60s aesthetic of black-and-white photos overlaid with translucent blocks of colour.”
As if this technique wasn’t time-consuming enough, Klingels finds the process of translating her initial visualisation of an illustration – “which is a very strong image in my head” – into a finished project is often fraught with worry. “The vision is always beautiful, perfect, the best thing I’ve ever done, and the reality of the illustration is always a disappointment,” she says. “As soon as I start to sketch it out in pencil the image starts to dissolve and fragment. I feel that the work lies in navigating between these two points. This journey is often boring and laborious, but it exemplifies something.”
Under the tutelage of her “very capable and patient husband” Christian Petersen (of graphic design studio Dumb Eyes), Klingels is also beginning to adopt more digital techniques in order to finish and refine her images: “The only limitation is my lack of technical ability, but I’m learning to prepare and manipulate my images more dexterously and efficiently. I recently created a series of patterns for Italian Marie Claire, which really stretched my new-found skills to their limits.”
But she’s adamant that a purely digital process would never be for her: she feels that hand-drawn imagery is simply in her blood. “I’m certainly no anti-CG purist though,” she asserts. “The amazing skills of digital artists are equal in my mind to the skills of traditional draughtsmen and both have a place in the creative industry. I’m keeping a tradition of hand-drawing alive, and that’s right for me.”