The Sorcerer Pharesm

THE SORCERER PHARESM - A black ink and black color pencil drawing on an 11 x 14 size coquille board. It appears in the book, "THE EYES OF THE OVERWORLD," by Jack Vance, published by Underwood-Miller in 1977.

I know that many illustrators, incuding comic book artists, often use brushes to ink their drawings because a brush is a much more versatile tool than a pen. I use a Technograph pen that has an ink tank in the handle that allows for changing the nub sizes, they range from "very fine" for thin lines, to "very broad" for wide lines or bigger dots. Actually, I started out tryng to use a brush but I was such a clutz dipping it into an ink bottle and making a mess that I quickly switched to the Technograph pen. When I think about it now, I should have overcome my clutziness and mastered the use of the brush, it would have saved me a lot of time. But then, my drawings would have looked a lot different . . .

All of my drawings are first rendered in pencil and then finished in ink. Whenever my workload was especially high and the deadlines short, my wife Dorothy helped me out, as she did with the "Eyes of the Overworld" drawings. I would ink all the lines on a drawing, put an "X" in large areas I wanted filled in with ink and give it to her to do the filling while I started inking the next one. When we were both done inking the drawings I would finish them with a black color pencil for the final shading. She really was a great help.