One Pen, Not Five

One Pen, Not Five

Produce ONE image, 2:3 portrait: a black-ink poster on white, drawn by hand. Follow every line. Replace only the FIELDS block; everything after it is fixed.

First — do you have the fields?

If any field below still has braces around it, stop and ask. Put all the questions in one short message, and show the example under each one so they can see the shape of a useful answer. Wait for the replies, then draw. Never fill a brace yourself: a value you invented is a value nobody asked for, and it will look exactly as considered as the ones they did give you.

Ask in whatever language they are writing to you in. Translate the questions and the examples; do not make someone read English to tell you what they want.

The examples are only examples. If someone answers a question, use their answer; never fall back to the example because you prefer it.

If the fields are already filled in, ignore this and carry on.

Fields — replace these six lines only

• The headline: {a few words}
• The scene — who, and what they are doing: {a person, an action, and the things around them}
• The asides, written in the margins: {two or three, and where each goes}
• The line on the cart or wall: {one sentence}
• The information block: {the names, the type of event, the time, the place}
• The closing line and the credit: {a closing line — a credit}

The tool law

The whole idea of this poster is that one person drew it. That falls apart quietly, by accumulation, and it is the thing to guard.

There are exactly two drawing tools:

• A thick one — a brush or chisel marker, with dry edges and visible drag. It draws the headline, and nothing else except occasional heavy accents.
• A thin one — a single nib width. It draws the scene, the hatching, the asides, the arrows, the motion marks, the closing line, and every other hand-made mark on the sheet.

Nothing in between. No third weight, no fine liner alongside a medium liner, no outline drawn at one width and filled at another.

Everything hand-made comes from one of those two. A reference run of this style used a chisel marker for its headline, a fine technical pen for the illustration, a felt tip for the asides, a typeset grotesque for the information — and a script typeface for the closing line, sitting directly beneath real handwriting and imitating it. Five tools, and the poster stopped being something a person made.

The hand

The asides are written by whoever drew the picture. They carry the linework's own qualities:

• the same slant, and the same drift off the baseline
• the same pressure variation, thickening on the downstrokes
• letters that differ from each other — two S shapes in one word are not identical

Written this way they belong to the drawing. Set in a face — any face, however casual — they sit on top of it.

No typeface imitates handwriting anywhere on this sheet. If a line should look handwritten, draw it.

The type

The information block is honestly typeset: one plain sans, two weights at most, ranged left, sitting as type and looking like type. This is the one machine-made thing on the poster and it does not apologise for it.

• The credit line goes smallest, at the very foot.
• Small pictograms may mark the time and the place. One nib width, matching the thin pen.

The drawing

• Black ink on plain white. No colour, no grey ink, no paper texture.
• Cartoon proportions: big heads, springy limbs, wide eyes, exaggerated action.
• Tone is hatching. Every dark area is made of strokes you could count. No flat grey, no gradients, no soft shadow — but solid black fills are fine where a thing is actually black.
• Motion is drawn: speed lines, arrows, radiating marks, small stars, steam curls, hearts.
• Generous white space. The sheet does not fill up.

Placement

Each aside sits in the drawing, where the field puts it — on a garment, beside a hand, in the gap under an elbow — pointing at what it refers to with a small arrow where that helps. Asides do not collect into a block at one side.

Never

• ✕ more than two drawing tools
• ✕ any typeface imitating handwriting, in any size
• ✕ asides set in a font rather than written
• ✕ grey fills, gradients or soft shadows
• ✕ colour of any kind
• ✕ photographic or 3D elements
• ✕ paper grain, canvas texture or a tinted ground
• ✕ text the fields did not supply
• ✕ every aside stacked in one column

The result

A sheet you would believe one person made in an afternoon: a fat brush headline, a thin pen everywhere else, handwriting that matches the hands it was drawn with, and one honest block of type at the foot that never pretends to be anything else.