I participated in inktober twice and made a lot of inked artwork after that as well. To create my inked art, I use a mix of different tools. The most important are a colored pencil for the base sketch, fineliners to ink, and moleskine paper which doesn’t bleed through. You can find an overview of all of the tools I use for Inktober on my Amazon affiliate page. I also have a detailed tutorial about inking on my Patreon, which you can also purchase from my tutorial shop!
Other Activities
Information about my traditional art, animation, and web designs!
Pencil sketches
When creating pencil sketches, my only requirement is that the pencil I use is a mechanical pencil. Any mechanical pencil will suffice! I’ve used pencils that I picked up for free at hotels, as well as BIC pencils with 2B lead. I also like to use a blending stump to smudge the drawings and create shading effects. I have a detailed tutorial about my sketching process on my Patreon, which you can also purchase from my tutorial shop!
Sketchbook
Most of my traditional art is made in my sketchbook, which is an A4 sized moleskine sketchbook. This is my favorite type of sketchbook because the paper is nice and thick! There are a lot of alternatives out there with similar quality, so definitely do your research to find an ideal sketchbook for you!
My animation work
Although I do mostly digital painting and concept art, I studied animation and have worked on various animation projects in the past! You can find an overview of some of the animation work I did in the animation section of my portfolio.
Animation software
My tool of choice for animation was TVPaint, a program which offers good digital drawing tools and a timeline. I usually made the backgrounds for my animations in Photoshop and composite my animations in Adobe After Effects. I edited my animations with Adobe Premiere Pro. Although I don’t animate anymore, I would definitely recommend Procreate Dreams since it’s an affordable one-off purchase and has powerful animation tools!
How I gained followers
It’s a long story! I’ve been actively posting my artwork online ever since I started drawing digitally in 2003, so that’s where it started for me. I started out on these websites called Oekaki boards, where I posted artwork alongside other board users. I also posted all my work to Deviantart and maintained a personal website during that time. In 2009-2010, social media platforms became huge. During this time, I branched out to tumblr, instagram, facebook, and twitter. In general, I try to stay flexible and evolve with the changing social media landscape. I think posting cosistently for such a long time allowed my following to snowball over time, and I also think that I started out when was way easier to build a following – social media algorithms didn’t exist yet and the platforms were way less saturated. In many ways, I was in the right place at the right time. My current focus is on building my newsletter, since I find that social media is getting more and more restrictive.
Where to find me
My website
I’ve had this website since 2004! In the beginning, I coded it myself using notepad because my little sister was generous enough to teach me basic HTML. If you want to see some of the previous website designs (warning: they are sometimes a bit whacky), check out this google album. The current version of this website was expertly created by my partner, Arjen Klaverstijn, using WordPress! WordPress is my tool of choice for my own website designs, like Loish’s Digital Art School and my links page.