Page #24
Released
Speaking of pens, until now, I've put off getting a white gel pen. Now that I have one (a Uni-Ball Signo UM-153 Broad), I think it's becoming one of my most important tools. For this page, I haven't used it all that much, but I've inked some later comics, and it's super-useful (page 26 is where I think I am starting to use it more actively, due to a new paper upon which my ink smudges more easily). White inks, white-out, and gouache are things I've experimented with a tiny bit, but nothing really clicked for me. The humble white gel pen, possibly last idea I expected to find suitable, has been the most useful, by far.
On the subject of gel pens, white:
Gel pens, also called rollerballs, are similar in their ink feed mechanisms to ballpoints, which I tend to pretentiously scoff at (unlike the human). Rollerballs have a different type of ink which helps alleviate the problems of ballpoints, but they still lack many of the qualities that I find useful for drawing.
They have a more thick, viscous ink than is used with other feed mechanisms, which I find provides less consistent ink flow. Due to the transparency of the ink, I find I often have to go over darks twice. Due to the wetness and thickness of the ink, it means that to reliably make opaque marks, you lose control because you're sloshing a small puddle of white ink around. This makes the white rollerball unsuitable for work on fine detail. The width at which the ink is applied to the page isn't reliably consistent, which makes stippling impractical.
So this brings the question: given my petty nitpicking, what do I actually like about the white gel pen? It's not white-out, it's not gouache, it's not white ink; and for any likeable qualities those possess, it's able to somewhat do them without having those tools' downsides. White-out is good for big, opaque corrections, but is inaccurate. The gel pen can do corrections, including small ones easily, which are the most important to me. Gouache+water, applied with a dip pen, is nice for detail work, but is not opaque. The gel pen can do a bit of detail work, but may come out more opaque while doing it. I haven't tried gouache by itself, or applied with a brush, but that lacks the portability of the gel pen. White ink is basically the same situation as gouache+water. White ink and gouache, also, run same risk as using a dip pen in general: sometimes you get a puddle of ink if you're not skilled with it, and I am not skilled enough to have that confidence in my abilities with a dip pen.
So in short, white gel pens are good because they balance the qualities of the alternatives, without being quite as bad in some areas.