art supply
One thing I know about color is that it usually doesn’t work straight out of the paint tube.
Charley Harper: An Illustrated Life, by Todd Oldham (Pasadena, CA: Ammo Books, 2009), 23.
I use Pelikan black drawing ink, and the crow-quill pen nibs. And you stick them in a handle. They’re all getting harder to find, all these antique art instruments. The companies that have made them are dying off one by one. But I got lucky. One day about six or seven years ago, my daughter, Sophie, bought a box of old pen points at a flea market in France. She found a box of about a hundred drawing pen points, and they’re the best ones I’ve ever used. They last and last, everything about them is fine, the point, the tensile quality, even the metal, the glass. The metal was just better, back then. I’ve still got maybe fifty of those. I think they’ll probably last me the rest of my life.
“R. Crumb, The Art of Comics No. 1,” interviewed by Ted Widmer, in Issue 193 of The Paris Review, 2010.
Paul Klee’s studio was once described as an alchemist’s lair, stuffed with the materials and instruments that he made and kept about him—home-made brushes, whittled reed pens, dental picks and razor blades fastened to improvised handles, gesso-caked cups and bent bits of wire to scrape, incise, and abrade the compounded surfaces of his paintings.
The Art of Looking Sideways (London: Phaidon, 2001), 24.
It can take years to find the right art supplies.
“Griffy’s Top 40 List on Comics and Their Creation”