Who Needs Friends…

Rejoice! for loads more rubbish Pentel Manga is now available thanks to the Canadian Pentel site.
Download it here. And, of course, because it is the Canadian site you can download it in French too!

I love Pentel so much. They are the Nintendo of pens!

My memory of felt tip pens has pretty much always been Berol colourbroard Fibre Tips or cheapo packs for 99p from the local novelty shop or woolworths. Now a days people tend to go for a permanent marker in an array of colours or Copic markers which don’t tend to streak and also have that added ‘im a designer’ tag.

A felt tip pen on its own is okay, even if you can decide on just one colour, but a spectrum of felt tip pens is not only better but also carries some sort of excitement. Keeping track of all those pens however can prove difficult, unless you have a fancy custom made pen holder or lots of elastic bands.

In the not too increasingly competitive market of felt tip pens one company went the extra mile and created a set of pens that would forever be a set. The company is Faber-Castell and the pens are “Connector Pens”. As a pen they are great, they streak like every other felt tip pen but every pen in the original set is still there next to its neighbour.

Plus points = random colour range, soft tips, don’t dry up immediately, the whole pen tells you what colour it is rather than a small plastic circle on the end.

Minus points = they don’t connect together when in use as the lid istoo small to fit on the end.

Find out how they are made here

This small shop on Clerkenwell road is a contender for the best art shop in London. It is easily the best shop for pens. Good for them.

Stuart R Stevenson

A facinating article on Pingmag

North American readers might be interested to hear about the recent meteoric rise of their favourite felt tip pen over here in Great Britain. I think it is fair to say that eighteen months ago no one here really knew what a sharpie was. Now they are ubiquitous. Overnight Sharpie point-of-sale displays, and till-side ‘impulse purchase’ stands have popped up in most art shops and stationers. I have seen sharpie TV ads and even Sharpie sponsoring part of London Design Week. It is an invasion! How will our native species of marker pens fair in the face of this onslaught? Technically I suppose Berols are our only genuinely British marker pens, but I have never liked them. For years now I have mainly used Pentel markers So I thought it might be interesting to have a blow by blow comparison between the Sharpie and my old favourite marker the Pentel Green label.

Round 1, Product Range
To start with I think there are many kinds of sharpies, such as the big fat ones, that we have not had yet in Britain. So far I have see the standard sized (confusingly called ‘fine’ but actually quite fat) the Twin-Tip and the small key-ring Sharpies. Pentel Green Labels come in two sizes The large NN50, which is quite a fat pen and the smaller NMS50. No double ended pens or anything like that. So not great.

Round 2, Colours
Sharpie wins this one too. I have a nice orange one and a Teal one. In fact they make 39 different colours (most of which are not available in the UK).
The Pentels just come in your standard Black, Red, Blue and Green. (although the similar N50 has seven colours)

Round 3, Ink Capacity
Right then. The first sharpie that I bought was a twin tip. It is a nice versatile pen, one end is nice and fat, the other is like a CD-pen. despite this, overall it isn’t much bulkier than a normal sized pen. I soon found out that there is a major drawback, It was dry within a few days! You cant have everything I thought. Unfortunately the single ended sharpies aren’t much better. I appreciate that you get a relatively chunky tip on quite a slim pen but, still, they are disappointingly short-lived pens. I can see why James Spader has about 50 in his office drawer. (More on that later.)
Pentels couldn’t be more different. They last a very long time and that is the main reason that I buy them over other pens.

Round 4 Tip
Although the barrel of the Pentel NN50 is almost twice as fat as a sharpie the tip is very similar. the pentel tip is longer and more bullet shaped, the Sharpie is shorter and more conical. The line thickness is almost identical. the Pentel tip is good quality and stays nice and crisp till the end. Well it softens up slightly but not enough to change the way it draws. The Sharpie nib might also be extremely durable and long-lasting. Unfortunately they run out of ink before you get to find out.

Round 5 Cultural status
I might be wrong, but I get the impression that in North America the word sharpie is often used to refer, in a generic sense, to any marker pen. Much like hoover for vacuum-cleaner. That’s quite impressive. Also a drawer full of Red Sharpies feature prominently in the excellent film Secretary. And in books 2 and 4 of Brian Lee O’Mally’s fantastic Canadian Manga story Scott Pilgrim the eponymous hero wears a Sharpie T-shirt.

As far as I know Pentel green Labels have no cultural status whatsoever.

Round 6 Aesthetics
I think these are both nice looking pens. The Sharpie has quite a friendly retro look and feels very American to me. The pentel has a more modernist vibe to its design. I particularly like the typography on the side of the Pentel.

Round 7 Smell
Well it was only a matter of time before this blog touched on one of the more sordid aspects of pen-love, pen-sniffing. Like all good permanent markers, both these pens have a very strong smell. The Sharpie has an intense, chemicaly aroma verging on the classic pear-drop/nail-polish smell that I think is associated with certain solvents (esters I think) On further sniffing I am getting an undertone of liquorice and a slight smokiness. Very nice.
The pentel, however smells very different and in my opinion much nicer. Pure Almonds. Well perhaps it smells slightly more synthetic than real almonds, and much stronger. Like extreme marzipan. I cant get enough of it.

Who wins? The sharpie I suppose has more going for it. However the low ink capacity is a fatal flaw that I think outweighs its other qualities. I will keep using them, especially if I can get my hands on some nicer colours. But my everyday black marker will continue to be the Pentel. Although this looks interesting…

Thank you to people who have emailed or left comments recommending pens that they like. Some, like the Pilot fine points that Mike commented about, I have been using and plan to feature properly at some point. Other pens have been new to me but I plan to get my hands on some soon. This includes the Edding 68, the “Anoto technology” Digital pen (Which boggled my mind slightly) Osmeroid and Esterbrook fountain pens and these crazy flat pens that Anthony Taylor told me about.

Finally, to all those who have been interested in the Pilot Grey/Black brush pens, Steve Alexander has pointed out that the Pilot V Signpen is very similar and more widely available outside of Japan. Apparently it is slightly chunkier and more robust, comes in a range of basic colours, but is single ended.

For those who still want to get there hands on the real thing, don’t worry, I am hoping to get some on ebay soon.
Have a happy New Year!

My first decent fountain pen was a Parker Slimfold that had originally been bought new for my Dad, I think when he was 21.
For over ten years, including all the way through college it was my only fountain pen and one of the main things that I drew with. And it was this pen beginning to fall to bits that first prompted me to go onto Ebay looking for vintage pens. They are a really common pen, probably the most produced British made fountain pen ever, so It is easy to get a good one quite cheaply. I have about five now and they all cost less than ten pounds. Some of them less than five. I have also bought quite a few as presents for people because you can often get them in the original box.

These are small pens and they don’t hold loads of ink. But they are generally good writers. All the Slimflolds I have ever seen have had a medium “number 5″ nib. They have a fair amount of flexibility and tend to have quite a soft, almost blunt feel to them. Not scratchy. I think of them as a quite a prosaic pen, cheap and cheerful, but still a friendly pen and quite forgiving to draw with. And, of course, because they have a gold nib, much better than anything you can buy new for a fiver!

These are magic-marker style pens. Quick drying alcohol based markers that come in a massive range of shades, including very faint colours. When I was a kid I always wanted some magic markers. They seemed to be the exclusive preserve of the profesional, old-school comercial artist. That style of fast and loose marker-art that I associate with storyboards or advertising scamps, well its horrible isnt it, but it has a certain profesionalism about it, which I cant help being fond of.
these days I do use this kind of pen quite alot and, true to form, I only use them for sketchbook stuff realy, hardly ever finished work. I don’t use them in that flashy way though. I mainly just colour in stuff that I have already drawn in ink.

Copic’s are the best of this kind of pen. You can get them in the london Graphic centre and Cowling & Willcox. Although neither of these places seem to stock the oval ones, which have a brush at one end. I have only ever seen these in Japan. This is a shame because the brush is great and is probably the main reason that I prefer these pens to other simmlar makes. But also, I love the colours that they come in and am paticularly attached to the warm-grey range.

These are quite expensive pens but then, you can buy the ink in bottles as well as replacment nibs and even special refilling syringes. The Copic website is quite usefull too.

I could tell you about Spy-Pen…But then I would have to kill you.

In the summer I got a delivery of some of these Japanese brush-pens courtesy of my friend Maki’s dad. what a nice bloke! Out of all of the brush-pens that I have got my hands on over the years these are the only ones that I have found myself genuinely using on a daily basis. And I was down to my last one.

They are kind of a brush/felt-tip hybrid. quite a bit stiffer and more pen like than most brush-pens. The brush pen that you see the most outside of Japan are those black Pentel ones that take cartridges. they are very good, but basically the same as using a brush. Kind of a portable, convenient brush substitute. whereas these stiffer style brush pens are a unique drawing tool in their own right. they have a springy, flicky feel, which is very nice.
One end is black and one end is grey. Apparently this grey ink is specifically intended for writing condolence letters! It is great for drawing and I generally run out of the grey before the black. But like most Japanese pens, they have a generous amount of ink in them. In fact, if you were only using this pen for its intended use, you would have to suffer a hell of a lot of bereavements before you ran out of the grey ink. I hope that dosent happen to you.

There are other makes of grey/black pens that are fairly similar to these. Some look a bit nicer (more traditional) Pilot ones seem to be the most common. I have met other people who draw with them. Steve Alexander from Rinzen, I know he uses them.