What is This Site, and Who's it For?
Welcome to Pencils & Inks! A collection management tool, community storefront, and public museum of original comic book, comic
strip, and illustration artwork(predominantly B&W). This
website is intended as a tool that allows artists, collectors, and dealers to
manage their entire comic art collection, including things like keeping track of the price you paid, price you sold, shipping costs, auction house fees, commissions, the contacts you dealt with, trades you made, and lots more!
It is one of the central things I felt our hobby of comic book art was still in
need of: a tool to keep track of our entire collections, including the financial side. Where we got it from and who we've dealt with.
And then if you want to sell or trade it, do it right here. Not auction it. Not sell on consignment.
Just list it.
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.
We don't sell your information or bombard you with ads or anything smarmy.
Golden Rules
1) This site only allows original artwork. No prints, no autographs, no lithographs, no button sets, and so on.
2) Only artwork you own may be listed in the public or for sale sections of the website. Please do not leave out of date artwork on the website(you can Archive any artwork you once owned).
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 put it out there.
Why comic art? Basically, I'm a collector and artist myself who wanted a place to manage my collection without using Excel files or databases. I wanted a website that could keep track of every piece in my collection, where I got it, who I got it from, what I paid, what fees were involved, and all the other little pieces of info I liked to keep track of. Give me a broad view of my entire collection. And then I wanted to use that same website to show off the art I owned that I wanted people to be able to see, and then put art up for sale easily when I had stuff to sell. No relisting on other websites, no managing a bunch of different copies of the same work, but one site that does it all.
But there wasn't anything like this out there. There were places to list artwork to display, list artwork for sale, dealers who would take it for a commission, and lots of other places that could handle a piece of it, but no single website that could do it all. Or do it for free.
So I created it.
I made a site for all
of us to manage our entire collections. A site for all 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 and keeping track of things:)
As for it being free? Well...why not? Why does everything in life need to be driven by money? Many of the best websites out there are free. The Googles and Yahoos of the world.
I see plenty of ways the site could bring in money down the road without resorting to charging user fees or overloading it with ads, so if it ever comes to the point that the site needs to bring in money to survive, we'll deal with it then.
But for right now most of what's been invested is labor. Our hosting costs are minimal.
Not much of an expense for a pet project I've invested thousands of hours 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(v3.0). 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 allows 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 in the public areas of the site. 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 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 made. A place to connect buyers and sellers together. Free consignment if you will.
But even that was just the start. In early 2009 I released v2 of Pencils & Inks, which finally realized the basic vision of the original site. A place to manage your entire collection. You can enter every piece of art you've ever owned and keep track of what you paid for them, who you got them from, what trades you made to get them, and lots more. With simple clicks you can make your artwork appear in your public collection or show up for sale. No relisting stuff in multiple places, no wasted effort, just simple and straightforward.
The current rendition of Pencils and Inks is a far cry from its' ASP counterpart that was never fully realized. But the new version is coming along and making headway. Maybe eventually it'll contain all the ideas that it was intended to, but for now it will be in chunks as time permits:) Assuming of course people find the site useful and use it:)