Process #2

After the pencilling, truly all the creative decisions had been made and I found the process from then on to be – comparatively – relaxing. I could put some music on, or an audiobook, and settle in for an afternoon of inking.

Throughout the process I used 01 and 005 Pigma Micron pens which I went through by the boxful. I always inked a whole page with a 01 first, going back over it with a 005 to add finer details afterwards.

When I wore the pen nibs down to nubs, which was inevitable, I marked them and put them aside. Not quite the in pen graveyard, because these nubbins were ideal for the scribble-scrawl, the main visual metaphor for my illness, which appears to greater or lesser extent throughout the book.

Only after every bit of ink had been scribbled out of them did the pens become defunct, but I still couldn’t bear to part with them. Somehow the growing stack of dead pens felt like more of an achievement than the growing stack of artwork piling up around my studio. And yes, I am still hoarding all the dead pens.