Years ago I used to regularly draw with a quill pen and india ink, but lost my pens somewhere along the way and didn’t replace them. This week I picked up another set and then had to ask myself what the hell took so long. I’ve been hunting for decent brush tip pens in order to regain line quality in my drawings, that variation from thick to thin in a single line and single stroke without having to “manually” fatten it up. None of the brush tips I’ve found have worked at all since the tips always shred after just 15 minutes of use. I’m about to give the Pentel Pocket Brush pen a try, and maybe a Kuretake brush pen I’ve been hearing so much about. But the quill pen really hit the spot for me this time around. Drawing today’s comic – Leave It To The Passion Of The Beaver – was a little odd for me in that I didn’t lay it out in pencils first, which probably shows. The grays and dialog were dropped in with Photoshop but aside from that I didn’t do any clean up. I used the new quill pen and tried to just draw what felt natural rather than tracing over pencils. To draw rather than trace when I ink is always the goal, but sometimes the pencils can be really distracting and the drawing suffers as a result. This time I just dipped the pen in ink and started drawing, and it felt great. Hopefully that shows in the result.