The Technical Pen

The Technical Pen features over 300 illustrations, including 34 full-color images in the hardcover edition (paperback edition is in gray scale).

Although originally designed for architects and engineers, a technical pen is an ideal tool for fine artists, illustrators, and graphic artists. Whether you want loose gestural sketching or tight, deliberate renderings, a technical pen moves smoothly and easily over the paper’s surface. It offers a precise and predictable line quality that can’t be matched by any other type of pen.

Gary Simmons, renowned teacher of pen-and-ink techniques, covers every aspect of working with the technical pen, beginning with a thorough explanation of its anatomy, operation, and care. He also includes troubleshooting tips as well as advice on choosing appropriate nib widths, inks, and drawing surfaces. Simmons demonstrates how to achieve the wide variety of strokes and stroke patterns that the technical pen makes possible―including continuous parallel lines, crosshatching, stippling, and more―and explores, through copious illustrations, the different effects various techniques have on their own and in combination with other approaches.

Simmons shows how to put the pen strokes to work through step-by-step demonstrations that illustrate the ins and outs of expert level image construction, from initial pencil sketch through final inking. He explains the fundamentals of form, tone, texture, and “color” in drawings, and how to make sure that the pen strokes do what you really want them to do. For instance, perhaps you’ve added a layer of hatched lines over a bird’s feathers to create a shadow effect, only to discover that you’ve obscured their texture, or maybe one area of your drawing has become too dark. Gary Simmons addresses these and other common obstacles of mastering the medium and explains how you can avoid and solve them.

Gary Simmons has been working with pen and ink and the technical pen for over forty years. Simmons has conducted pen-and-ink drawing workshops nationally for Koh-I-Noor, and he teaches fine arts at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia, Arkansas.