 Though he stated in a 2006 interview that he favored PITT pens for convention sketches, but never for cover work, he later used them to illustrate the cover of "ImagineFX" magazine #67 in 2011, and for an illustration of Fire and Ice for a Justice League card game.He occasionally will use Copic markers in both warm and cool gray tones to render covers in grayscale.Similar to his penciling, Hughes tends to ink different portions of the sketch at random, though when rendering an attractive female, he begins with the face, so that in the event that he fails to capture her good looks, an entire rendered illustration has not been wasted.