About My Tools + Process

My zines are self-published, designed, printed and assembled in my home studio using a combination of analog and digital techniques.

I don't use AI in my work, and neither should you.

For digital drawing, I use an iPad and Procreate. For layout, editing, and file preparation, I use a Macbook and the Affinity Suite, which works basically like Photoshop but at a much lower cost with a much lower memory footprint.

For analog/traditional drawing, I use whatever I have at hand. I often draw in ballpoint, using a Zebra F-301 or a BIC 4-color. The trick with ballpoint is to find one that lays down a relatively dry line; with the right pen, it's basically like drawing with a mechanical pencil. For fast sketches and watercolor drawings, I use a Uniball Signo DX gel pen. They come in many colors, they don't skip, and they produce thin lines that are smooth and waterproof.  

My ink drawings are done with either a Kuretake #13 brush pen or Pentel Pocket brush pen. The Kuretake is springier and leaves a finer line. The Pentel is wetter with stronger line variation. I like Platinum Carbon fountain pen ink for both, which is fantastically waterproof once it dries and can be diluted with water to produce a range of grey tones.

My watercolor palette is a combination of Sennelier and Daniel Smith watercolors. I sometimes use a little bit of white gouache for highlights (but a Sakura gel pen works just as well.)

I scan my work with an old Epson multifunction printer that's been out of ink for about a decade now but the scanner works great. I just use ImageCapture on my Mac -- no reason to contaminate my system with some first-party printer/scanner control software.

Finally, I print my zines on a color Brother laser printer, HL-L3270CDW. Brother printers are generally reliable, rock-solid, and the cost of first party toner is reasonable compared to other brands.

About My Custom Fonts

I've developed two custom fonts for my work -- River Roman Hand, and BoldHand.

River Roman Hand is a hand-drawn text typeface based on Typographic Labs' Day Roman, which is itself a reproduction of an vintage book type. It has multiple variations of every letter, ligature, number, and punctuation mark. All the characters were drawn in pen on paper, then scanned, cleaned, and compiled digitally. In hindsight, I should've added non-English characters and diacritics, but it takes forever to draw every glyph by hand and even longer to configure the software.

I created BoldHand way back in 2015 as an informal bold handwriting font, using some online tool that I forget the name of and which probably doesn't exist anymore. It has limited punctuation, no ligatures, and questionable legibility. Nonetheless, it has served me well over the years.