My Inktober Pen Collection (and Paper Woes)

You know how Inktober rolls around and suddenly you're reassessing every pen you own? That's me right now, staring at my ever-expanding collection of ink tools.

I've got the whole spectrum here. There are handmade bamboo dip pens gathering dust. My Micron-style fine liners seem to multiply on their own, along with the usual Sharpie felt pens. And yes, I have Copic markers, but I'm not their biggest fan, except for the soft brush ones.

I like Gel pens, especially the water-soluble ones. Here's the trick: I'll sketch my lines, then quickly grab a brush pen and tease out a wash from those fresh gel lines for instant shading. It's brilliant for quick sketching. I've hoarded quite a few coloured gel pens as well, though I really should use them more.

For the last few years, my absolute favourites have been Faber Castell Pitt pens. Proper Indian ink pigment, they last ages if you're disciplined about capping them (which I am). I've also got traditional Indian ink for dip pens, Chinese ink with a grinding stone, Chinese brushes. Ok, I can't help myself, I splurged on a set of Schmincke AquaDrop watercolour pigment inks with a pair of refillable pens. So yes, I'm well stocked.

      

I've been illustrating my pens and brushes on the back pages of my sketchbooks for years. I even made a video about this "obsession" once. This Inktober, as I use each tool, I'm drawing it in the back of my colour compendium. It adds a playful meta-layer to the whole challenge.

Where I'm slack is with surfaces to draw onto. I'll just grab whatever scrap is nearby, often printed on the other side and start sketching in a 2B pencil before inking over it with a Sharpie. It scans fine for dry work, but add any water? Instant crinkled mess. This year I'm trying to be better, grabbing actual sketchbooks with a page or two left when I need to use a colour wash.

When I have time to be properly organised, I reach for mixed media pads (120gsm cartridge paper, designed for ink and light watercolour). Hot-pressed watercolour paper works too, but it feels too expensive for casual Inktober fun. Bristol Board was the gold standard for ink work from my cartooning days, but I haven't found a good source lately. Honestly, I do most cartoons digitally now anyway.

So that's my setup. Now, where did I put that scrap paper?

Two Ways to Inking: Traditional vs Digital

The term "inking" has been part of cartooning vocabulary for decades, it's simply the process of going over your rough sketch with a final layer of ink. These days, most artists do this digitally, but the name has stuck around.

I wanted to compare traditional and digital inking methods using my Inktober 2025 submission for Day 19: Arctic. My cartoon shows penguins who've clearly lost their way (fun fact: penguins live in the Antarctic, not the Arctic!).

My Traditional Approach

I started with a rough sketch using a Copic brush pen. I'll be honest—I'm not a fan of Copic fine liners. They clog constantly, so I stopped buying them years ago. But their brush pens? Those are superior. They keep their flexible tips and create line work similar to traditional dip pens, which suits my cartooning style perfectly.

Here's where I made a rookie mistake: I started on paper that was too thin to handle water without buckling. So instead of traditional watercolour washes, I switched to Inktense pencils and blocks. These are great because you can apply them dry, then activate them with just a light touch of a water brush. Hopefully, this would prevent the paper from wrinkling too much.

My Digital Method

After scanning my preliminary sketch, I moved to my computer-based process. One I developed years ago after attending a cartoon workshop. This technique became the foundation for my blog "Meet the People" and its character Alvin and his wife.

My workflow goes like this: I scan the line work into Paint.NET for editing, then paste it into CorelDraw (I've been using it since version 3, originally for technical diagrams). The magic happens when I convert the bitmap into vector line work using CorelDraw's autotrace tools. These automatically smooth out the kinks in my original ink work.

The key trick I learned was to enclose any shapes I wanted to colour. Then colouring becomes simple—just click and select. I use Pantone colour patches for consistency across all my illustrations. When shapes are simple, colouring is quick and easy. Complex shapes with lots of fixing? That can get tedious.

The Verdict?

So which approach is better? That's for you to decide! Each has its charm—traditional inking has that organic, hands-on feel, while digital offers flexibility and polish. What's your preference?

Proof reading and summary assisted by Claude Sonnet 4.5 (AI)

Inktober 2025 Progress

I managed to get halfway through Inktober submit something everyday on the day it was due. A couple of submissions were late at night. Still I impress myself with staying power. I’m now looking at the prompts and trying not to do the really obvious. Not that there is an obvious illustration for a more conceptual ideas like today’s blunder. 

I guess there’s a lot of scope, blundering into something, you don’t want to make a blunder. But then I remember about the old fashion blunderbuss, the 17th century equivalent of a rifle. It could be loaded it with all sorts of things and instead of having a finely machine barrel to keep the bullets on track it had a wide open end. I guess it would have worked a lot more like a shotgun scattering bits and pieces all over the place. I’ve seen a couple of these gun and quite liked the way they were shaped and might be interesting to illustrate.

So I got onto DuckDuckGo and asked for illustrations of blunderbuss’es and I got a lot of cartoon-ish pilgrims carrying the definitive shaped rifle. hunting and bringing back home turkeys. Ahh, It’s about to be Thanksgivingin the USA! Nice Coincidence. We don’t have Thanksgiving in Australia, it’s not a family get together here. I guess we do have the Melbourne Cup about a week later which is a big deal an opportunity for a holiday and party, still I felt bad bets blunders might be a slightly different take on this theme, just a bit harder to draw.

Hope you enjoy my inktober submissions, I post them daily on my Instagram @normhansonart.

Inktober 2025, and an Extra Challenge

I’ve been doing some of Inktober prompts for the last several years. Not full on, just occasionally. Usually, I start and get about halfway through, then life takes over and there’s never enough time. Still I do have a bit of fun, getting to exercise pens that I have almost forgotten about. Sometimes it easy to get distracted because sometimes the prompts can become pretty obscure.

Just before this year’s Inktober I noticed Danny Gregory of SketchBook Skool had undertaken a little project. “How long should it take to do a drawing?” where he painted the same object in three different time frames. 15 seconds, 90 seconds or 15 minutes.

I was both intrigued and inspired so I decided to do a similar exercise as I started inktober this year. First, I started with the simple prompt moustache and only gave myself 15 seconds which is actually more time than it sounds. Then I moved on to weave prompt in 30 seconds, which was an obscure ode to Michel Eugene Chevreul, a 19th century French chemist asked to settle a dispute between weavers and dye makers. His investigations lead to his formulating the Rule of Simultaneous Contrast (of Colours). Which in turn inspired many os the French Impressionists. Next a crown in one minute, but now as I’m trying to do fairly precise lines, a minute didn’t seem very long at all. I just doubled the time allowed for each new prompt.

When I got to 16 minutes for my starfish, I figured there was enough time to create a decent ink drawing. So I stopped timing after that, I normally try to get my pen work done around the 20-minute mark. If I’m doing an ink or watercolour wash it’s fairly easy, but when I do stippling or cross-hatching it can take a lot longer. Dating back to my early cartooning days I do find stippling and cross-hatching somewhat therapeutic You’re just drawing the same pattern over and over again keeping you in the present, the aim of most trendy and expensive wellness workshops. It isn’t really spoiling the fun, just extending it and free!

Remember those days before all the computer tools, when a single click that can now fill in a shape didn’t exist, OK we had Letraset patterns which you could cut out and stick on. But for most ink shading we had to do it by hand.

You can follow my inktober submissions on Instagram @normhansonart