Animation 101: Four Reasons to use INK..

You have your daily sketchbook.. you have the habit.. you have the passion for observation, exaggeration, characterization and interpretation.. Try using INK. I use a fine point sharpie.. they are cheap and look great. Here are Four Reasons to use INK:1. Ink teaches you to commit. I've always had trouble committing, in life and in art. When you use ink you simply can't erase or undo. You learn to live with your choices, and more than that, you learn to appreciate your unfiltered choices (which some would call "mistakes"). Your brain is way ahead of your hand, and this is illustrated literally in the form of line. Learn to love these lines that seem to come from your subconscious, those are the lines that are honest, and the more you respect them, the more you will trust them.. next stop, good drawing.

2. Speed. There's nothing more painful than seeing someone slowly carve out a drawing. Most likely that that drawing will not have a shred of energy or motion to it (even if it's rendered well). To achieve motion and force, I believe an artist must capture the image from memory, from an instant. Ink teaches you to throw lines down.. boldly and quickly. When you're a traditional animator faced with the task of drawing thousands of images, this comes in quite handy.

 3. It's clean and lasts forever. Have you ever seen a pencil sketchbook a week after that book has been carried around everywhere? without fixative (that spray that will eventually kill you if you breathe too much of it) those pencil drawings will become smudges. Archivally speaking (making up words ) Your ink lines will look great 20 years later (i know this for a fact).
4. It looks cool. Ink produces often wonderfully unpredictable results, the way ink seeps into different textures of paper is something you can play with. A colleague of mine uses a water based pen and often mixes his saliva with the ink to do tonal work.. it looks great in and out of the crime lab.