Revelation: I can be a real cartoonist without a dip pen

My ongoing battle with keeping my own style but pushing myself to be a better artist with more tools available to me. Keep trying to get comfortable with a dip pen and ink so that I can abandon my technical pens, which I think of as amateurish. But then last month I met Pascal Girard at the book launch for Reunion, and he uses technical pens and he is definitely a Real Cartoonist. That meeting, combined with ongoing disastrous results from my own experimenting with pen and ink, has driven me back to the technical pen. As Lynda Barry says about her book Cruddy (I can’t find a link to the exact quote), she kept thinking she had to write it in a particular way that was not her own style. She couldn’t actually finish the book until she realized she could write it in her own way. So anyway, I am back to technical pens for now. And that’s cool. Technical pen celebration by Sarah Leavitt