Copic Multiliner vs. Sakura Pigma Micron

Have I already ranted and raved about everything I’m using to make quarantimes art? Not totally, but we’ve covered most of the major players. I mentioned in my post about the Copic markers that both Sakura Pigma Micron pens and Prismacolor Col-Erase pencils would smudge when colored over with Copics. At the time, rather than buy Copic multiliner pens, my strategy was to use Col-Erase pencils anyway (the blue seemed to smudge the least) and put lineart down over the colors once the drawing was colored. The sensible and sane thing to do (just buy the Copic multiliners!!) has finally been done, now it’s time to report on them.

I had Alan (of Crazy Alan’s Emporium) order me up the multipack of 9, and have quite lazily used nothing but the 0.3mm so far. The only reason for ordering up these pens is to be able to do lineart that won’t smudge when colored over with Copics. That’s all I’m asking of them. Look nice? Don’t care. Be smooth? As long as it’s not like dragging a jagged knife across a sandpaper-coated log, I’ll make do.

Thankfully, they are nice to sketch with, and of utmost importance, do not smudge when colored over with the Copic markers. Nor did they smudge when I erased the Col-Erase pencil prior to coloring. So, are they worth it? APPARENTLY! At the very least, if you’re going to be coloring with Copics and want to be able to make yourself lineart to work with, you’ll want to fork over more dollars to get yourself a set of Copic multiliners.

An Experiment: Fountain Pen Ink in a Waterbrush Pen

As I wondered in my last post about the feasibility of putting water-based fountain pen ink in a waterbrush pen, this week it’s time I follow through on that half-conceived thought and put my own possessions on the line to see how this plays out.

Step one: gather the materials. You’ll need a waterbrush pen—I’ve decided to use a Caran d’Ache medium water brush because it was the first water brush I found among my scattered possessions. Step two: realize the water brush still has water in it, frantically eject and violently shake water out of the water brush to the best of your ability. Accept that there are still some stubborn fragmented water droplets in the water brush, and that you have no patience to wait for it to dry out further. Step three: summon up your very frighteningly be-needled ink syringe and ink of choice (for this experiment, I chose J. Herbin’s Gris Nuage, because in my time I’ve found J. Herbin inks to be well behaved, and the light grey ought to do well for sketching), and use the dangerously stabbity syringe to transport ink from the bottle to the belly of the water brush beast. While I could have used the plunger mechanism on my water brush to suck up ink, I didn’t want any backwash from the brush to end up in the ink bottle, so this seemed like the better way to go. Then push the little squeeze zone and wait for the ink to make its way to the brush.

First thoughts: this can hold a lot of ink. That will be handy. And this particular water brush, since it has a hard body is a lot more secure to transport around, while still having a little squeeze section to control the ink flow while working. But the ultimate question: Does it work?

The ultimate answer: apparently! So far, anyway. I’ll continue testing this bad boy and see if any unforeseen consequences pop up (anticipated scenarios: the pristine bristles get stained by the fountain pen ink; if I ever want to use this as a water brush again, what if I can’t get the ink washed all the way out so the water is always tainted???), but for now, especially for a cheap water brush, filling it with fountain pen ink seems like something you can do with minimal downsides. Time will tell if the water brush rises up to choke me in my sleep, or gets dried out ink clogged in it or something. But my shiny first impression is that, rather than try to clean ink out of an ancient ink-filled brush pen, filling up an empty water brush may be the better way to go.

Old Pentel Brush Pens: a Short Cautionary Tale

This will be a quick post, just to tide you over. A time may come in your life where you find an old Pentel brush pen, one that has perhaps been slightly chewed on by a cat at some point in time, a brush pen that you can say with confidence you have not used in at least two years, but possibly five or more. You may shake the brush pen, and hear no liquids jostling within, and you may attempt to use the brush pen and note how dry and barely depositing on the page at all the whole operation is. You may then notice that the brush tip unscrews from the body (in exactly the opposite direction of the way you want it to), so the thought may occur to you, “can I possibly clean out this brush pen and fill it up with a fountain pen ink of my choosing?”

Dear reader, do not fall for this trap you’ve created for yourself. It has been days of me trying to clean this thing out, including use of the magical miracle Rapido-Eze pen cleaner, and STILL there is ink that comes out. If you want this concept so badly, just buy an empty waterbrush and fill it with ink.*

*Note to self: test whether this actually works.

Tag Team: Copic Markers & Old Moleskine Watercolor Notebooks

Copic markers occupy a weird place in my psyche where I could be holding a fistful of them in one hand, a single fountain pen I spent the same amount of money on in the other hand, and yet think to myself that the Copic markers are what’s expensive here. Logically, that makes no sense but emotionally? That’s where my head is at.

When I noticed a couple months ago that my local enabler, Crazy Alan’s Emporium, carried Copic markers now and I still had cash leftover from working the Baltimore Pen Show (ah, remember pen shows in the beforetimes?), I decided to nearly double my hoard of markers. Copic is pretty much the top name brand in the art marker world, and for good reason. In the hands of a skilled artist, they make magic happen. And even in the hands of an amateur like myself, you can make some cool art with Copic markers. They blend amazingly well, and no other markers I’ve tried can compare. When you hit on marker gold, why try anything else?

Some quick notes about Copic markers: the ink is alcohol-based, non-toxic, and low odor (though it does have a specific, particular, and not altogether unpleasant smell). They are refillable. The plastic bodies of the markers feel quite durable (this isn’t cheap plastic, and at these prices better not be). There have been stretches of time where I’ve certainly not used the original markers I had for over a year without any detriment in the performance of the marker (undoubtedly more than a year, I just have no clue how many years we’re talking). I enjoy the oval-bodied sketch markers the best, and nearly exclusively use the brush tip to color my art. And for whatever cockamamie reason, I decided that the paper I would use to make a lot of new sketches after acquiring a bunch of new markers would be a Moleskine watercolor pocket notebook picked up on sale years ago when Borders went out of business.

Unlike standard Moleskine paper (which was so terrible the last time I checked, I swore off buying any further standard Moleskines—if this has changed in the past few years, please let me know and also send me a sample of good paper from a Moleskine as proof, because I don’t believe you), the watercolor paper is good for both its intended purpose (watercolor) and the juicy medium of liquid-based sketch markers. For the most part, I’ve not had any bleed through so far, and that’s including the time an overfull marker dropped a big honking blorp of ink on the page. I did find a couple spots that finally bled through elsewhere when I colored over a section approximately ten thousand times, which is not recommended.

Those of you with keen eyes might notice that the above image is lacking lineart. Here’s another Copic fun fact: it does not play well with anything besides more Copic. Copic Multiliner pens? Fine, great, no problem. But Sakura Pigma Micron pens, Col-Erase colored pencils? Well, the Copic marker treats your lines more as suggestions that it doesn’t particularly agree with.

When I saw that the Sakura Micron pens would smudge, I decided I would add the lineart after coloring, and I would just sketch in Col-Erase pencils first instead. Guess what, the Copic ink will also push around the pigments of the Col-Erase pencils. Those pink ears there? I deliberately used the Copic colorless blender to push pink Col-Erase pencil around on the page. In my experience, it seemed like the blue Col-Erase pencil would get smudged the least, but all in all my strategy became sketch lightly, color with the markers, and then put lineart over top all while hoping for the best. The benefit of this strategy is when that blob up there happened, I was ultimately able to fix the drawing since I wasn’t yet confined by any lineart.

I still have much to learn in terms of properly wielding these markers, but I’ve enjoyed using them to make color drawings of my characters. I will continue to expand my Copic collection at every opportunity I can, because these markers are worth it.

Tag Team: Akashiya Bamboo Brush Pen & J. Herbin Diabolo Menthe Ink

Once upon a time, I thought it would be a good idea to go back through my reviews and update them with how a product held up over, say, several years. A pen can be great right out of the gate but if it kicks the bucket after a few months, that’s an important thing to consider in terms of whether it’s worth it. Unfortunately for the greater cause of knowledge, I never felt particularly inspired to actually take up this quest.

And while I still don’t feel especially compelled to launch that project, this ramble of a review certainly falls in line with that intention. I first reviewed the Akashiya Bamboo Body brush pen over 8 years ago, when JetPens apparently sent it to me for free (wow, thanks y’all, that was mighty kind and luckily I’ve gotten much better at using this thing since then). I also forgot that it used to have white writing on the barrel, because that has long since worn off. The rubber finial is a little scuffed, and the barrel now has a couple small cracks toward where it screws together, but it’s not something I notice when using the pen.

But this isn’t just about the brush pen, which has somehow survived 8 years of probable abuse and neglect. This is about that rare combo that elevates the pen into something better: J. Herbin Diabolo Menthe fountain pen ink IN the brush pen.

Back when I was first using this brush pen, I fell into a trap thinking that it needed to be inked up with black ink. There’s no good reason for why I fell into this trap. I certainly noticed that the ink cartridge the pen came with was the same as a Platinum Preppy cartridge, but it took a shameful amount of time before I put together the realization that I ought to be using other colors of fountain pen ink in this brush pen for maximum drawing satisfaction–I don’t see evidence of me using colored ink in this pen for drawing until around 2015, and even then the inks I used (Sailor Yama-dori, J. Herbin Emerald of Chivor) did not inspire a renaissance of brush pen sketching like the Diabolo Menthe has.

I’ve mentioned before that the turquoise family of colors is magical, and this holds true for the Diabolo Menthe. It’s light enough to be a great sketching color that looks good with darker lineart over top (the lineart also being the only means by which to correct mistakes), while also being dark enough to make visual sense for the frequent times I just don’t feel like making the effort of going back over a sketch with another pen.

The other great benefit of this particular ink is how well behaved it’s been in two unlikely places: the sketchbook with the paper I didn’t like where the Pentel brush pen ink liked to fuzz and feather without any regard for my feelings, AND on the Mead typing paper where I simply assumed, due to the astonishingly light paper weight, that anything heavier than a pencil sigh would be a disaster.

I’ve already filled this brush pen back up once, and foresee this becoming the sort of regular in rotation that I never let run dry.

Much to my amazement, JetPens still has the black body and natural body versions of this brush pen in stock. It’s still a very big pen, the cap neither posts nor has anything to keep it from rolling away into oblivion, and I’m sure there are more practical brush pens to use this ink with. But they just don’t look as cool, and that’s the majority of what matters. This is a cool pen that I still haven’t completely destroyed 8 years later, and this ink makes me actually want to use this pen. What more can you ask for?