The stuff you use really determines the quality of your work. I noticed a change in my sketching and drawing and concepts when i changed what pencil i used. Some stuff i dig:

SKETCHING:

PRISMACOLOR COL-Erase Pencils for sketching. I’ll use blue & red to indicate shadows & Light. They are smooth pencils that roll on the page really easily with out leaving serious grooves in the paper. You don’t need to fight the paper when hashing out ideas.

DRAWING:

Lead Holders: tired of your pencil scraping up the paper? cut the middle man and just use led! Thx to Nelson Blake II, i picked up using led holders. HB for general drawing H for finishing up and B ( soft) for sketching. the softer your led the more smears happen but the harder led makes grooves in your paper so use each one wisely!

INKING:

Most of my work is done in Adobe Illustrator but before i do that, I Ink by hand with Japanese Sumi Ink to finalize my sketches. Its not for everyone – especially those who do finishing pencils. But my process is slightly different. I go from sketch to slightly neater sketch to digital. trying to mimic the lines i come up with in my drawings. ( sometimes there are good ones in there) the last thing you really want to do is correct things when you work digitally. it takes up tons of time. One ends up doing so anyway but the more work you use before hand the better.

Finishing:

WACOM’s CINTIQ. I use a monitor that you draw directly on top of. I like to have an additional monitor to calibrate the colors as the screen’s settings are hard to adjust. You want to make sure that you’re stuff is the color you see other wise you’ll end up making stuff too dark or unbalanced in a particular color. The Cintiq comes with a stylus that has mouse buttons and even a digital eraser.  It saves my art life – i promise ya. Its leveled up my abilities 10 fold.  ( they should sponsor me with all this praise i’m giving lol. ) But to be honest, if you're not use to using a wacom pen - i'd recommend getting a bamboo or the mousepad like wacom tablets before graduating to the cintiq. It takes time to get use to it. You might find yourself very frustrated with the adjusting time. For a professional, learning while creating is not often something you can afford to do. So ease into it. The smaller cintiqs run you about 1000 dollars , which is quite an investment. But the pads are anywhere from 60 - 150 dollars.