Inkwell Studios is called Inkwell Studios because when we started this little enterprise back in the late 20th century we actually used ink- with pens, brushes, sponges, scratchboard, rolled onto linoleum blocks, spattered with old toothbrushes- and also because so many of the illustrators we admire are ink guys: Charles Gibson, T. S. Sullivant, A. B. Frost, Alex Raymond, George Herriman, Wally Wood, Ronald Searle, Al Hirschfeld, Robert Crumb, Ralph Steadman and on and on. We still keep a bottle of Dr. Ph. Martin's Black Star on our desk, even though most of our work is now finished using an electronic drawing machine.
The illustration above was one of our first self-promotion pieces, from the days when we were shamelessly aping Michael Schwab. Hand-inked, lettered with presstype and individually colored using an aerosol can device that attached to the tip of a Design Marker. A bit labor-intensive, as it turned out; we probably mailed three of these at most.
