Pencil Artist of the Week: Erik Klaus

This week’s featured pencil artist is Erik Klaus, a pencil artist from the United States who is an aspiring comic book artist and illustrator. His DeviantArt profile is filled with drawings of comic book icons like Batman and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, as well as characters of his own creation. His drawings range from rough sketches, to fully-colored digital pieces, to the works-in-progress in between.

Like any artist, Erik’s tools have evolved as he has honed his skills and learned new techniques. Here is a breakdown of this evolution in Erik’s own words:

“I started school using mechanical pencils, 0.5 and 0.3 with leads ranging from HB to 2H, but I’m heavy handed and I used to break the lead a lot. So I stopped using mechanical and switched to wooden pencils. I would start with a 3H wooden pencil for roughs and then tighten up with a wooden F or an H… but it was a lot of switching, and sharpening, and seemed to take too much extra time. I’ve never really been a super big fan of blue pencils, though I’ve tried that too.

So after trying lots of different pencils I finally settled on a 0.9mm Pentel mechanical pencil. I have HB lead in it and I use it for everything. I’ve found that the 0.9 thickness keeps me from breaking the lead, and the HB is soft enough to not dig up the Bristol Board and give me some variation in line weight and dark to light values.”