There’s a whole back story to the idea of going off-line and off the grid but that can wait until another day. Suffice to say that the experiment is a long time coming.

Everyone pretty much knows what “Off-Line” means but what is “Off-the-Grid”? I’m no expert on the subject but living off-the-grid can be defined as living a self-sustainable existence. Most people would automatically link the idea of living off-the-grid with being backwards mountain folk. Yes, most backward mountain folk live off-the-grid, but not all off-the-grid people are backwards mountain folk. Basically, the idea is not being hooked into government utilities and such. (And, just for your information, to backwards mountain folk, we urbanites are backwards city folk.)

In my (admittedly) utopian mindset, I can live without the need of any services from outside – not have to pay any bills per month. But I digress. Like I said, this all can wait for another day. Today I would like to talk about ink.

I recently purchased a Sony Vaio laptop and set up all the peripherals. I am having trouble with the software for my Wacom tablet. After an unproductive and frustrating morning of trying to get it to work properly, I realized that this event was what I had been asking for – an excuse to return to ink.

My current process of creating Perk at Work and Attack Mimes involves a penciling by hand, a scan, then “inking” directly into the computer via the pen tablet and Adobe Photoshop. Much conditioning got me proficiency. Yet a big part of me wanted to have a physical final product, like Dave Kellett of Sheldon has. Plus I didn’t want my work to be dependent of a computer, a program, a pen tablet, nor electricity for that matter à la the essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer” by Wendell Berry.

So I did it. I took my pencils and inked them. It’s not like I’ve never used ink in the past and I recently hand-inked a few Attack Mimes Dogstradamus adventures (click here, here, or here). But there’s a safety from working with the pen tablet. I can easily re-ink lines I don’t like or erase mistakes. With ink, it’s not as easy. What’s more, I can re-size drawings if I need more place for text. Not so with ink. When placing ink to paper, I need prudence. Such prudence has gone dormant with editing programs. Even as I type, I’m using OpenOffice.org to edit the copy.

Now, I’m not totally over to the ink side. I still scan the inked paper into Photopshop and do some touch up as well as all the text work and formatting. But this is a step – the first step. Before long I’ll be farming my own land and knitting socks from wool I sheered from my own sheep.