See here for Part One.
I started talking about brush pens without clarifying a basic point. I use them because they are very, very convenient. You can, of course, just use a traditional round brush and dip it in your ink of choice. Nothing stopping you at all. Hell, I might get back into fully traditional brushes before all is said and done. I certainly cut my teeth on sable rounds back in the day. I remember dropping a whopping $5 on a Kolinsky #5 round when I was 20 and I thought it was super expensive. For 1991... it was.
But back to brush pens...
I wanna talk about a Chinese pen. I picked up a 3-pack of Yongsheng 3009 brush pens recently. My understanding is that there are several versions of this tool produced by various Chinese companies. I don't know. I just know I got a set labelled Yongsheng in a 3-pack for like $15 and holy shit they are worth every penny.
So far I have only used 1 of the 3. This is not a set of various tips, mind you. It's a pack of 3 identical pens. The body is clear and very nicely designed with a built-in piston refill mechanism. You don't use a cartridge or ink converter with this thing. You just stick the tip into your jar of ink and twist the piston to fill it up.
The tip is good. Synthetic fiber, decent tip coming to a fairly fine point. Not as delicate as a Kuretake or Pentel, but pretty good. Nice feel. The grip has a triangular shape, so it feels pretty good.
The flow is very different from other brush pens. At first, it will flow heavily. Almost too heavily. Then it will start to give you a lot of dry brush lines. Here's the key. Twist that piston one time. It has a tactile feedback that lets you know when it has been twisted once (great feature). That will force some ink down into the feed. Because it is clear, you can see the ink hit the feed. It will immediately flow out the tip. Do not twist more than once! It will flow too heavily and drip on your paper! One twist is all you need.
I have been doodling with this thing quite a bit and so far I gotta say it is quite good. I've refilled it only once so far (it holds a fair amount of ink). I will report back later to let you know how the tip holds up. So far, so good. Very nice, responsive, good-feeling tool that is frankly quite cheap. At $15 a set, these are basically $5-$7 each depending on shipping and all that. Very, very cheap for a reusable tool like this.
Thanks for the recommendation. I'm gonna try them out. I do my work with sable brushes or normally a 102 crow quill. Just the other day, I started using a Zebra G nib with a Tachikawa nib holder and, man, is this nib and holder sweet. I've been missing out all these years. I have to say though, it was a PITA prepping the nib. Maybe it was just the one I had, but it took me forever to get it to flow right but once it did, it was golden. You can control the line thickness from very fine and narrow to very wide easily. Just marvelous with the way it flows. I have yet to do a real piece with it. Just practice pieces but I can't wait to do a real piece.
ReplyDeleteI'll check out these brush pens. It would be good to use them in my sketch book. You can't really carry around the real thing. Not easily anyway.