Starting out...

When you are first starting out with drawing you don't mind using basic pens and pencils but as soon as your skills start to improve and you begin to really develop a style you should take the next step and secure yourself some decent gear. 

However when I was trying to find out what materials or pens you need to use I found that people just didn't want to share that information (either that or I was just looking in the wrong place) and as a result I often used to spend a lot of time in the aisle of the art shop trying to work out what paper or pens I needed to buy. This resulted in a massive collection of pens and a lot of trial and error (and cash spent) before I ended up with a good idea of what I needed to have in my collection.  

Now I am the first to say that what you draw with is very much what suits your style and is very much down to your own preference but this is what I use and I hope that it's useful to some of you...

PENCILS AND ERASERS

One of my tips is to invest in a good quality propelling pencil. The benefits of using a propelling pencil is that you will always have a consistent nib and there is no need to buy a sharpener. I use a Rotring Tikky 0.5 pencil with a 0.5 HB lead. You change the lead by taking the end of the pencil off (the eraser end) and feeding in the individual leads. This pencil is great and whilst slightly expensive well worth the money. 

It is also a really good idea to buy yourself a really good quality eraser, one that actually removes pencil lines effectively from the paper (yeah I thought that was an essential for an eraser but it seems not to be the case for a lot of cheap erasers). Here i have the Rotring Rapid-eraser B30 , it's a nice quality small eraser.

PENS

If you want to start drawing detailed line work then you need to invest in some good quality pens. They need to have a good quality nib! And you will need to buy different pens with different nib sizes.

These Staedtler pens are one of my favourites to use, I use 0.2, 0.1 and 0.05 for all my pointillism drawings. You can get these pens from ebay for about £3.00 each. I'll review each of these pens in detail in another post. 

PAPER

Treat yourself to some nice quality sketchbooks, I like to use paper by the brand Daler Rowney. I use a heavy weight white Acid Free A4 220g paper for art work which I want to have an aged vintage feel, like this hand illustration of mine...

I have also been known to draw on watercolour paper, like my bird skull drawing here...

And when I really want to push the boat out and use the best paper I go for Bristol Board, like when I did this drawing...

Bristol Board has a smooth almost shiny surface, it doesn't absorb ink in the same way as the other papers i mentioned in this post will and in my experience it is also the best paper to use and blend promarkers on. 

I hope you found this post useful, please leave me a comment below on what art materials you recommend or if you try any of my suggestions let me know via twitter . If you would like to see more of my art work follow my portfolio instagram account here or my personal instagram.

Amanda x