The crappy ink pen that changed how the world looked

also

1920'S hygiene 

Lots to cover today. You are going to learn A LOT. Including about a drafting tool that changed how everything looked for two decades, hygiene in the 1920's...we're gonna run the gambit here because I missed a few weeks.

First off, I made progress on the cover I showed ya last time...

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I conferred with my buddy Jared, and decided to just get rid of the buildings in the background, as they were a symptom of my own artistic vanity, and only complicating things visually. I instead went with the ole uneven linework to fill it in.

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How you make that is...unfortunately, just how you'd think. Make 68thousand lines. But if Basil Wolverton could do it, in an age before energy drinks...

... then so can I. The real issue, in my head this whole time, has been colors. This is were it stood with my own instincts at the wheel.

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I like it, but I'm entirely not sold on those colors. I asked Jared, who's coloring is way different than mine to give it try and see how he'd approach it. (btw Jared is up for an award and you can vote for him HERE).

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I'm not really a fan of having shadows on my work, but it's tough to argue that this ain't scarier. I don't personally like the colors, BUT I do think it's better, and one can't limit his palette based on personal like...or I'd never use the color green or orange. A larger problem is her in blue gives it a Alice in Wonderland look and THAT we do not want. Also the purple kinda leans into Anime tentacle vibes...which we also do not want. Though, initial thoughts of it being some anime tentacle monster or H.P. Lovecraft cosmic horror might be unavoidable.

All you H.P. Lovecraft fans out there, know this- his ambiguous writing style wasn't some out of the blue, mad genius sh*t. It was a whole style/genera, then. The reason you know who he is and not everyone else, is that he let his copyright lapse and Cthulhu became public domain.  He was a hack compared to Arche Obelor.

You want some ambiguous horror writing, that'll put hair on your chest, go search YouTube for his old "Lights Out" radio dramas. Now that I've bored everyone who doesn't know who either of those people are...

More or less that'll be the cover of the upcoming issue, which I will have more info for you about next time. Important info...like who's gonna publish it and why.

C2E2 in Chicago went well, sold a lot of books, got a few cool commissions. A more involved one, that required doing after the show, was for Daredevil vs some of the Arsenic Lullaby Zombie Fetuses. This was to be a full fancy pro inked 11x17 illustration. I played around with the idea roughly and we decided on this-ish.

(Assuming you can make anything out of this scribble...)

With some word balloons to add a gag and of course DD's standard radar sense circles.

 So...the more refined final sketch was like so (below). Though I laterdiddmuch hand wringing about how many fetuses and in what arrangement.much hand wringing about how many fetuses and in what arrangement.

That, up there, seemed like a pretty good amount, but when I blew it up to 11x17...it felt a bit sparse. It's a delicate balance, how many cartoon fetuses is too many and how many is not enough.

It's almost two different stories...depending on how many fetuses.  One, him already covered by some, and one with only those coming at h. Like, one is a split second of time and the other is the middle of an ongoing struggle. This is going to have thought balloons, so the struggle scene jives better.is a split second of time and the other is the middle of an ongoing struggle. This is going to have thought balloons, so the struggle scene jives better.

The real challenge here is going to be the customary circles to imply DD's radar sense. At 11x17 that's trickier than you'd think.

 ...for the inner three I can just use a standard compass. You all know what one of those is, right?

There's an adapter for the fancy one like I got, so you can use a technical pen with it to ink the circle. You just take the pencil lead thing off,  shove the adapter in, take the technical pen apart, screw the guts of the pen into the adapter, and there you are.

BUT, this thing ain't big enough to draw circles a foot and a half in diameter, like I need for the outer circles on this drawing. You need a beam compass for that.

I have one. It was my Grandfather's, who was a draftsman for an engine company. When He passed away I ended up with a lot of his drafting tools. This set here has all the parts for a beam compass...

 but it's from the 50's or earlier and predates technical pens. So..no way to ink with it with the adapter/pen tip. What it has for inking, is...this

 THAT is the head of a line pen that fits onto the beam compass. I'll explain what a line pen is and we'll all understand why Grandpa didn't want to talk to ANYONE for several hours after he got home from work. Here's a line pen...(sometimes called a ruling pen)

That little dial in the middle adjusts how far apart the tips are, and that determines how thick of a line it will make...

First you gotta fill it with ink. and you do THAT with an eyedropper. You squirt a few drops in between the two tips and the laws of physics keep the ink in (in theory, but not really) and gravity pulls the ink out as you drag it along the paper.

The upside is, these things make the sharpest, crispest lines you ever saw and the precision/variation of line width you can get is amazing.

These things love making straight lines. You got two points of contact to the paper, they both sort of dig into it a little...you can make a straight line a foot long without a ruler as long as you're half trying. You just put it to the paper and pull down and it pretty much keeps itself straight

All that cool art deco art and ads and design from the 20s-30s, where it was lots of tall lines of varying thickness, repeated, stacked, borders with more boarders...that was all done with line pens.  

What you make is always a by product of the tool you're using, to one degree or another, and the tool of the day was a line pen. Letters were often tall and/or narrow...The fonts you think of/see for art deco, or the 20s and 30s in general, were that way because that was the easiest way to letter something with a line pen.

All design, at least back then, started on the drawing table. How things looked, from ads to toasters, to cars, to buildings, all started on a blank sheet of paper...with the tools of the time (e.i. a line pen). The tendency to use this pen for what it does best (narrow repeated lines, close together) translated to everything they designed. In a way, the entire look of the world, for a time, was the by product of that pen...skinny letters, stacked lines, extra boarders.

People romanticize "art deco" as some zeitgeist, cultural mood...when really, it was because of that pen. Much like the balloon-ey lettering and rounded edges on everything during the hippy days, was less a change in mindset of designers as it was because technical pens were on everyone's drawing table

once these were perfected (ish) and readily available, you could actually make a curved line freehand without smearing ink everywhere ( more on that in the second). Technical pens had been around for awhile before they were actually worth using. The earliest models came out in the late 30's and they were terrible. It wasn't until the 60s that technical pens got more refined and finally overtook the line pen as the tool of choice. And that's when you started seeing lettering like this...

You can not do stuff with a line pen. The dual tips touching the paper, which makes it so great at straight lines, also makes them nigh impossible to make curves with, unless your using some kind of template or stencil or curved straightedge (French curve set). And the odds you are going to smear ink using a line pen and a stencil are really really high.

Was the wild expressive imagery being made first in the 60s and 70s a reflection/bi-product of the cultural change going on? Meh... maybe. BUT, there's also the factor that graphic designers finally had a tool where you could make big curves and loops with a consistent line, without templates, or stencils. And those people, unchained from the time consuming precision needed for line pens and brushes, could knock out their projects in half the time if they just crapped out big hippy lettering with a technical pen.

Is stuff like this visually impressive and expressive...sure. But to someone with skill and a technical pen it's - "I can knock this job out before lunch, if I go all out on the weird lettering".

 A tool not only determines what something will look like, but your whole mindset, as far as what you are going to try to do in the first place...based on what they can do. The boss says "spice up this ad"... 1970's guy with a technical pen that's good for drawing curves, makes everything curvy. 1920's guy with a pen that makes straight lines, adds dynamic straight lines.

Which makes me wonder if I shouldn't maybe take a try at hand painting this cover a couple of ways, maybe with watercolors or acrylic paint, just for the sake of figuring out the color palette I want. Using photoshop might have me thinking inside the box too much.

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Back to line pens....

 The downsides to line pens, aside from being garbage for drawing curves, is they are a pain to fill, and you have to refill them constantly. Also they drop ink all the time on the way to the paper or across the paper on the way to what you were going to ink, and it's a 50/50 chance that its going to come out in a big glob the second it touches the paper...

 It also likes to come out in a big glob when you end the line and take if off the paper if you accidentally tilt it. and they lay such a thick line of ink that it's five minutes before it is dry enough to touch. Which means, if you are not super careful ( which I am not) you're going to smudge lines often.

Prossibly...if I used one everyday for three decades like he did, those things would not happen.  Either way, they ain't exactly user friendly.

While I was looking for art deco ads as examples, I ran across this from the 20s

A tampon ad...in the 1920s?! What the hell they made out of? Asbestos and cocaine probably. And there were several competing brands. 

..."sphagnum moss", I guess that answers my "what were they made out of" question. Frankly, asbestos sounds nicer than sticking moss on your...

In case the text is too blurry to read there, it mentions that moss was used by the red cross during the war. So...that's a military grade tampon, right  there. 

This tampax one is pretty stoic.

They mention it's used "internally", twice...I guess idiot proof warnings aint new. I like the strategic illustration that makes it look like its the size of a cigarette. I bet the reality was a jarring surprise when they opened the box.

That's the fun thing about research, you end up learning things you didn't even figure on learning. Women had periods as far back as the 1920s...crazy.

...how far back does this "period" thing go anyways? Back to the cowboy days? How far back would I have to go before a woman I'm with isn't tired of my bullsh*t, one week out of every month? Now that I think about it, according to Deadwood, they had periods at least as far back as 1870, and the doctors used to prescribe opium for it. That's turning a negative into a positive. We should still do that. A prescription for opium ain't a bad idea no matter what day it is, if you're having to deal with me regularly, if I'm being honest.

Did George Washington's wife have periods? "Dear Martha, the cold here in Valley Forge is rather dastardly, and I'd like to come home. I feel you took my comments other than as they were intended."

It wasn't mentioned in the Odyssey...or in any Shakespeare plays...so...sometime between 1611 and 1870 is when periods started. I looked for stuff that changed in the 17th century and found...THIS

Ah ha! caffeine is what caused periods. Next time I'm around a woman who's on her period and getting frustrated with me I'll let her know. I'll just say "if you didn't drink so much coffee, your vagina wouldn't hurt". Let's all try that.

Anyways...trying to make a circle with this wonky pen tip, attached to that awkward to use beam compass, was going to be fraught with peril. Also, It dawned on me that compass is going to leave a noticeable/distracting hole in the center of DD's head, after making 6 circles with it.

One could say "that's part of the process", but...I'm going to try to avoid that. Some things are more acceptable to me as "part of the process" than others. White-out for example. People ain't perfect it's being done by hand...you're gonna have to white out some things here and there.

In this case...the word balloons are to be right over some of the circle lines.

And every time I put this tip to the paper and bring it off, I'm spinning the revolver cylinder on a game of Russian roulette. 

 It's hard to explain how unwieldy this thing is. 

Most of the problem is out of my hands as far as how steady it stays. It has the part making the line, the part that pokes into the paper and a rod next to it as a brace. And each of those has a little dial to tighten them.

And those dials are 50years old and that rod is polished stainless steel. They just do not want to stay tight. I could get a pliers and try to crank the sh*t out of them, but it's even money they'd snap right off. So...the tool has some limitations. The ink tip likes to pull inward coming off the paper and/or leave a blob. Some of that is me, but I made several test runs and a lot of it is because this thing's not tightening up.

I know I can white out the part of the circle I make with it, where the word balloons will be, and have it be next to unnoticeable. I do NOT know that I can make large circles picking up and putting the tip back down on the paper avoiding the area with the word balloons. (read between the lines on that as- I don't think I can. I tried several times, each ended in tragedy.)

I think I can do it in the areas where the fetuses are clustered, because if there's a small issue when I drop or pick up the tip I can mask it by thickening the fetus outlines, and there is a lot going on visually. The word balloons though, they are all by themselves, there ain't anything going on around them...any hickup in the circle line will stick out like a sore thumb.

Grandpa could maybe do it, but he worked with this thing for three decades. I don't think my guy wants to wait that long for his commission.

But, back to the hole this makes in the paper. That's what this thing is for...

the amount of paraphernalia in ole Grandpa's tool kit just to do different specific things is amazing. This little circle has a hard plastic tab in it, and you poke your compass point onto that so it don't poke into the paper.

But, "how well does it stay put on the paper?" you may ask...very poorley. So, what I did was hot glue the f*cker to some real thick removable tape and that worked okay-ish.

I took a smart pill and just did the rough outlines of the drawing, knowing I'd f8ck up a few attempts and not have to redo detailed final pencils every time.  and I did, f*ck it up a few times. this last one really hurt because it turned out great and I just titled the pen too much on the way off the page, scuffed it and glorp...ink trail.

Y'know, after seeing the competing tampon adds...I got a thought about the whole Epst8in Island thing. We can all agree it is horrific, so we're going to put that aside for a moment and be stoically business minded, This was a lucrative business with a clientele that many criminal business men would be interested in having as customers. Which means...this wasn't the only such island and he wasn't the only person offering this. 

ANY business or product that makes money has competition. There's Tampax and there is Kotex, there is McDonalds and there is burger king. There is BMW and there is Mercedes. You see what I'm getting at here? Everything that guy had going on, someone else also had going. And so, is still going on somewhere else, run by someoneelse.else.

It's not like this guy invented a death ray, or had some intricate Oceans 11 plan, that no one but him could have come up with or pulled off. It was an underage honey pot for rich people. That's not really reinventing the wheel. And I don't know if you read any of the emails, but this guy wasn't exactly D.B.Cooper. He seemed like kind of a dope. So...there's no way he was the only one doing this.

There's always competition. There is coke and there is Pepsi, and actually...there is also RC cola and the generic knock off brands like Kroger Cola. So...somewhere out there, there is the Kroger cola version of that island. Which is a premise I'm probably better off not exploring here.

 ...

Like...maybe they aren't even underage. The guy's just trying to pass off short eastern block refugees in ponytails as grade school-ers. "hey, what are you trying to pull here? This "twelve year old" has a Def Leopard tattoo, and made a reference to the Andy Griffith show".

I have worse avenues to go down with that basic premise than that, but let's just move on.

Here's how it turned out.

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Later

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