Many comic book artists and illustrators still favour these pencils for different reasons. For us, we love using it to plan our initial layouts, and since the non-photo blue is a different colour to traditional graphite, it allows us to go in and refine our original draft without getting confused or wearing our paper down with erasing and clean-up. This allows you to work through your artwork in stages (rough draft, refined pencils, and final ink), adding detail along the way. We’ve created an illustration to show this layering process, which you can see on the right of the photo.

Non-photo blue pencils can be difficult to come by these days, but luckily Caran D’Ache makes some great ones that we absolutely love using. On the other hand, if you like more precision in your drawing, the sky blue Pilot Color Eno lead for 0.7 mechanical pencils produces very similar results.