Welcome to Pencils & Inks! A community storefront of original comic book, comic
strip, and illustration artwork for sale and trade(predominantly B&W). This
website is a simple online shop that allows artists, collectors, and dealers to
list artwork they own in a public marketplace, completely for free. It's sorta
like Craigslist, but for comic art:)
It is one of the central things I felt our hobby of comic book art was still in
need of: a means for the average guy, be them artist or collector, to simply
list a piece of art you have for sale. Not auction it. Not sell on consignment.
Just list it.
What is This Site, and Who's it For?
As an artist, do you want to sell your art but not deal with the hassles of your
own site? No time or interest to learn web design, nor the money to sink into
creating and maintaining it?
Or as a collector, ever had a piece of art you just sorta...fell outta love with? You bought it for
all the right reasons, you loved the penciller, the inks were top notch, great era...just...something
was off...so when something else comes up you know you're gonna sell it.
So you think about how to sell your art. You don't want to throw it on eBay and pay those fees...the listing...the final value...seems endless. You can't get it onto
the big auction houses...and
nobody responded when you posted to the newsgroups and comic book art lists. But in reality does it matter if it sells today or
in 4 months? Nah. I just want to throw it up for sale on a site at my price and be done with it. Let someone come in 6 months, find it, and
contact me. The convenience of having a well trafficked site full of comic book
art, but without having to manage a huge inventory or maintain the website or
it's costs yourself.
Put simply, this is a site for artists, art collectors, dealers, fans, and just about anyone else who appreciates artwork!
This site is here for the little guy.
To allow the many to unite together as one. One large, free,
easy to navigate, comic art consignment shop, designed exclusively for comic art.
And it's here for everyone! Whether you're the old school collector who sells a handful of pieces a year, the dealer in training who needs a storefront to work
from, or the long established comic artist finally ready to start selling the retirement fund, everyone is welcome to make use of the site.
And And this site is completely free. There are no hidden fees, no required commissions, and no limits on how long art can remain on the site. All we ask is that you be fair to the community and remove artwork once it is no longer for sale or trade.
Golden Rules
1) This site only allows original artwork. No prints, no autographs, no lithographs, no button sets, and so on.
2) Only artwork currently for sale or trade can be actively listed on the website. Please do not leave out of date artwork on the website.
3) Please consider the purpose of this site and only list artwork that fits with
comic art, illustration, fantasy, etc.
Wait...What's The Catch?
The "catch" is that we ask for donations when your art sells. That's it. We know Pencils & Inks is a cool service and has the potential to be saving you quite a bit of
money over the auction houses of the world with their listing fees, final value fees, premiums, and so on. But even with providing a free service still come the day to day costs of servers and hosting. So what do we ask?
If your art sells for LESS than $1000 - all we ask is you consider the cool service we offer and ask you to donate part of your sale price if you can. You are welcome to never give us a dime and not be looked down upon, but we appreciate when you can help:)
If your art sells for MORE than $1000 - we do the same thing we do for under $1000, but we cock our heads a little and try to puppy dog you into feeling guilty
If you decide to donate, only give what you think the service was worth. And keep in mind this is IF it sells. You can list it for 10 years and still never pay a dime.
Donations of artwork are also always welcome!
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via Paypal to: | 
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What's in it for you? Why is it free??
I do web design professionally for a manufacturing company. It's very cool work and I quite dig it, but I don't get to have full control of the final product or work on all the kinds of things I want to play with. This is my pet project to accomplish that:) I've been playing with it for years and years now off and on, and finally carved out enough time to finish the latest iteration.
Why comic art? Basically, I'm a collector and artist myself who needed a place to list my artwork online when i had to sell something; a few pieces a year. But I wasn't that crazy about the options out there. I just wanted to post it for sale and walk away, only to be told when someone was interested, like a dealer can do all the time with their own site. But I didn't want to give up a huge % of the value of the artwork in the fees and commissions, nor was I about to pay someone to list it on their website.
So I figured why not just make the site I'm looking for? I'd make a site for all
of us non-dealers...the people who can't afford to hire a web designer, who
don't have enough artwork turnover to justify a site all of your own, or who are
too busy drawing to worry about selling:)
As for it being free? Well...why not? Why does everything in life need to be driven by money? I see this as my charity work to the cause of artwork. I know plenty of people will use it to make money for themselves, but as long as some of them are artists, I'm good. And right now all that has been invested is labor. To start with, our hosting costs are minimal. Not much of an expense for a pet project I've invested 1000+ hrs into, and one I'm quite happy to spend for such a fun project:)
Obviously if the site gets used these hosting costs will go up, but no worries:) We have some fun plans to look forward to for addressing that eventuality that you'll all enjoy:)
Artists
I'm an artist. This site likes artists. We want to encourage artists to sell their own art directly, without middlemen, to get the best value for their own work directly into their Cayman Island accounts. As such, we put no donation requests whatsoever on artists when they sell their own work. If you want to donate, feel free, but we want to encourage more drawing:) Donating drawings is welcome of course:)
For those interested, I post examples of my work on http://theartofthedoodle.blogspot.com, as well as occasionally sell some on the site: http://www.pencilsandinks.com/artist.aspx?artist=266
The site is "Wiki-ish"
This site is made for the community. It is designed to be partially Wiki-ish and let the community hold a stake in it. As such, there is a lot we allow the everyday user to do, from adding and updating artist information to marking questionable content(v2.0). And this will continue to grow as the site does. So please offer suggestions for things you'd like to see, and we'll try to make the site as community-centric as possible.
What the Resolution?? (1280x1024 + Broadband + IE7 = Highly Recommended)
Art is meant to be viewed big and bold, not in little pixellated versions. If we can't show it to you on the wall, let it take up as much of the screen as possible. The future will certainly be about fitting more and more pixels on the page, so let's get off on the right foot!
Obviously this site is not for the faint of computer power...it's designed around the person with the 19" screen and the broadband connection(and IE7). The kind who hates these websites that take up half of my screen. So while we're not yet appeasing the crazy resolution folks just yet, we're appeasing the rest of us:) This allow us to really work with the screen like it should be...real resolution...real widths to play with, get real clarity
of our images. So apologies to those of you who only see a piece of the website. We highly encourage you to buy a bigger monitor:)
The Cool Font (Free Aerovias Font - Download)
This site is not designed to be a cookie cutter, lowest-common-denominator experience. It is meant to push the limits and create the best user experience we can come up with for dealing with comic art. Part of that experience is the environment...the design...and by immediate extension, fonts!
We use embedded fonts on this website. We know not everyone will be able to see our embedded fonts automatically(which stinks),
but we are also committed to not investing endless time in little tweaks at the expense of further functionality, especially when only
a small percentage of users are affected.
So to allow everyone to enjoy the same experience as it was intended we've provided our central font for free here:
Aerovias Font - Download (This is a freeware font available from 1001freefonts.com with no license restrictions)
Nudity
This is an art site. Nudity for the sake of art is fine. Nudity for nudity's sake is discouraged. Nudity for weird and creepy fetishes does not belong here. Be tasteful. We don't encourage it, but we understand some people
like to collect that and won't try to stop you. All we ask is that you please
click the nudity checkbox when you add art so we can control where it appears
properly. Thanks:)
History
Pencils & Inks can trace it's start all the way back to 1999, when the name was coined during a discussion
with Whilce Portacio's brother-in-law Joe Mendoza and myself. The first real push though originally began in 2001 as a website to post your art collection online. I was doing it
with ASP and Microsoft Access and it sucked. Seemed like a useful idea. The Lowry
Gallery at the time limited you to a handful of pieces and was down quite a bit. I wanted a bigger version of it. Sorta like what ComicArtFans soon became.
The problem was that I bit off more than I could chew, and while I could dream up a thousand ideas for the site, I couldn't implement them fast enough, and didn't really have the knowledge or experience to do it right. So it took a long time. A long, long time. After about 4-5 years, with CAF firmly wedged in place, I realized that although my site was far different and had put in
thousands of hours on it, it was also in need of a total rewrite and scaling down. I couldn't manage my own vision for it. After a few years of development the site had just gotten too out of control.
Two years passed. There was only talk. Then in the fall of 2006 I started again. But I saw that CAF had really fit a large part of the void my site had sought, so rather than rehash what already clearly worked, this time I trimmed things down to one of the central things I felt our hobby was still in need of. A means for the average guy,
be them artist or collector, to simply list a piece of art you have for sale. Not auction it. Not sell on consignment. Just list it. The kinda thing any dealer can do with ease. Leave it up for 1 day or 1 year, leave it up until it sells. And it needs to be what everyone wants it to be...to not have to manage your own low traffic website or deal with commissions or even have to pay a fee. In truth, don't all of us hate having to pay to sell our art? Aren't the best deals ever when we deal direct with people? So that's the site I've made. A place to connect buyers and sellers together. Free consignment if you will.
This rendition of Pencils and Inks is a far cry from its' ASP counterpart that was never fully realized. Instead, it was decided to start small and grow the site over time, adding some of the same features originally planned, but further down the road instead of all at once:)
Artwork On This Website
'Welcome Girl' by Michael Wm Kaluta - Located on Homepage
'Viking Hammer Guy' by Whilce Portacio - Located on New User/Manage Account Pages
'No Artist Image' by Matt Faulkner - Appears whenever an artist image does not exist - All Artists
'No Artwork Image' by Jyrki Vainio - Appears whenever an artwork image does not exist - All Artwork