Ink Talk

I have been on a brush pen kick for months. My first experience with brush pens was back in 2000 or 2001 with the Pitt brush pen, which is not a "real" brush pen but a felt pen with a brush-shaped tip. The Pit is great, and you should try it out, but that tip wears out REAL quick*.

Sometime in the late 2000s I picked up two excellent brush pens and didn't fully appreciate them at the time because I was on the cusp of switching almost entirely to drawing digitally. I got a Sailor Profit and a Pentel Pocket.

Zip ahead to recent times and I have re-connected with traditional art in a big, big way. I've dusted off these old tools, picked up new ones, and have been experimenting and learning and growing as much as I can.

So anyway, this post is about ink. Because these types of tools are really, really picky and will gum up if you use the wrong stuff in them.

Sailor Kiwaguro ink bottle is sexy.

YouTube has been a great resource for learning and from various videos I picked up the suggestion that the ink you get with the Sailor (my personal favorite brush pen) is perhaps not the ideal ink. One I kept hearing about was Sailor Kiwaguro. So I picked up a pack of Kiwaguro disposable cartridges to try out and fell in love instantly. Now I got myself a bottle of the stuff and I plan to switch to an ink converter as soon as I burn through the rest of these dozen cartridges.

Of course there's a trick if you don't want to use a converter. You can use a blunt syringe to just squirt more ink into an empty disposable cartridge and reuse those bastards over and over and over again. But beware! Make sure you stick that syringe tip all the way past the opening and just give it a gentle, tiny push or else you'll have an ink explosion. Yeah, it happened to me.

Kiwaguro is a pigmented black ink that is pretty waterproof and dries fast. I like it.

Black as night, black as pitch...

Then there's this Noodler's black water-based ink I got thanks to many recommendations. This shit is VERY black. Whereas Kiwaguro (and most inks) have a bit of a dull finish, Noodler's finish is kind of dense and matte... almost velvety. It has a texture. You can feel the ink on the paper. But there's a problem: erasing.

If you're like me, you sketch in pencil, ink right on the pencils, then erase. When you erase over most ink, it might lift some of the pigment and dull the black just a little. Mostly not noticeable. But Noodler's loses quite a bit of opacity to the eraser (see pic). So while I do love the thick, black feel, I am not happy about the eraser situation. I will probably not use Noodler's on important drawings, though it is great for doodling.

Before erasing and after erasing, Noodler's black ink takes a beating.

*There's a super secret though. If you pull the tip out of the Pit brush pen you will discover that it can be flipped around and you've got a BRAND NEW TIP. Very cool. I had no idea back when I was burning through these things in the 2000s.