It all started with a pilot pen.
Back when I ran around Europe as a seventeen-year-old vagabond, I obsessed over old school travel illustrations. I’m talking those spidery, hyper-detailed sketches, inked from the corner of some fetid yet picturesque alleyway, where every cornice and street cat got its due. I wanted to do the same. But I was impatient, and often had to run away from street lechers, so I knew that a crow quill and inkwell wasn’t for me. Then, I found the pilot pen. Dirt cheap, available in any flyblown corner store in any corner of the world, a pilot only looks more archaic and spidery as it runs out of ink. You can blend it with water, or draw with it straight. I still swear by them
For paper, it doesn’t matter much - anything with a bit of tooth, thick enough not to bleed.
As I got older, my tastes got fancier. Now I add
* prismacolor markers in assorted greys
* some microns (0.05 for ultra fine, 0.1 for fine, and maybe a .7 to give some dash) in colors other than black (get all your misunderstandings out with a zig zag manic underdrawing of that hottie singer, then do the fine lines on top so its good enough to show her).
* some Ecoline brush pens. They have fat bold strokes, and you can turn them into watercolors using the water from that chaser you’re not drinking
* A probably stolen blue ballpoint. A gluestick for ephemera
I stick all this in one of those little zippered bags that airlines use to give you socks and toothbrushes on overnight flights. I also include my favorite lipstick
And if I lose the whole thing, like I did a few months ago on the train from Bialystok to Warsaw, I can only hope that I gave a fellow art girl freak her starter pack. As for me, I’ll be fine. Wherever I am, I can always get a pilot pen.
Yes. I’m partial to the pilot too.