Basic Equipment
Introduction
The equipment requirements to draw cartoons, cartoon strips, caricatures,
and animation is similar. Most of this is standard equipment found in Navy
drafting or graphics shops.
Equipment
The cartoonist’s equipment is simple and each illustrator may have his or her
own favorite tools. The following basic list does not include all the
equipment you may prefer. Be flexible in your selection of tools and
experiment with different products.
DRAWING BOARD:
A drawing board (18-by-24 inches) small enough to
tilt or turn will permit you to work on your cartoons at any angle.
T-SQUARE: Use a t-square in the layout of the cartoon.
TRIANGLE: Use triangles to draw vertical lines.
MASKING TAPE: A small roll of masking tape (approximately 1/4 inch
wide) will hold paper to the drawing board securely.
RULER: Rulers help maintain straight lines and you may use them to guide
brush strokes.
INK: Use black, waterproof ink, particularly if you are reproducing the
cartoon.
OPAQUE WHITE: Opaque white covers inking errors.
PENCILS: Select sky blue pencils for drawing nonreproducible guidelines,
general sketching, and layout. Very soft, dense black pencils blacken the
reverse of images for transfer to another substrate. Dense, black-leaded
pencils also create graded and halftone effects on rough surfaced papers.
Choose brick red pencils for making notes to the printer on overlays.
ERASERS: For areas that are difficult to erase, use hard rubber erasers.
Soft erasers work well for general-purpose work and art gum or kneaded
erasers highlight and perform final clean-up chores.
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