Review: Kuretake Clean Color Real Brush

This review is by Kalina Wilson, who can also be found at geminica.com.

The Kuretake Clean Color Real Brush has some of the same functionality as the Kuretake Blendable Brush Writer featured in my last review, but it's smaller and more affordable ($3, compared to the $7.50 Brush Writer).  So is it a good deal?

For me it isn't, though I have to respect it as a good tool that probably works very well for someone else.

The Clean Color brush has a nice brush tip, similar to the Brush Writer and other Kuretake "hair" brush pens, but a little smaller.

This bright yellow color is bold and slightly orange with no trace of brown or amber - a very nice color.

The body is more standard in size than the large Brush Writer, but  here's where we get to trouble - it doesn't allow you to squeeze to increase ink flow, which turns out to be a problem for me.  I want to be able to move fast and get a really wet line on demand, and the Clean Color brush just doesn't serve that function. I suspect it couldn't hold up to that use as well anyway, since it's a smaller, lighter pen that probably holds significantly less ink than the Brush Writer.

The other problem for me is color, despite how nice this bright yellow appears.  Like the Brush Writers, many very loud colors are available, which seems great until I think about actually sketching in those colors.  I gave it a try in combination with a dark line, but I feel like this would have been more fun if I'd just used watercolors.

It does merge very well with watercolors and with other water-soluble inks, just like the Brush Writers.  In the flower sketch, I used Diamine Red Dragon ink in a fountain pen with the Clean Color brush in yellow and a waterbrush to blend.

Here's yet another experiment, this time using a waterproof line drawing and adding some colored pencil and graphite, trying to determine if it makes sense to use such a bright color as a base for other colors.  It didn't really ring my bell, though I can see how it might suit someone else's style.  It seems like a useful thing that this pen can cover areas of your page in a brilliant tone without leaving it particularly wet as it would have been if you were using watercolors.  I can imagine this brilliant yellow being useful to have in a pen while traveling in the Mediterranean.

The pen works well for what it does - it provides water-soluble ink that acts like watercolors in a convenient pen body with a good brush tip.  If you like to work with bright colors and like having those at hand while travelling, and prefer something small and disposable, these pens are great.  Otherwise, well, watercolors can do a similar job, and the Kuretake Brush Writer is another  pen option that gives you more control and more ink for a little more money.

Review: Kuretake Brush Writer Blendable Color Brush Pens

This review is by Kalina Wilson, who can also be found at geminica.com.

I'm a fan of Kuretake's gray Fudegokochi pen as a tool for adding a water-soluble middle value to sketches.  Here's another option for adding middle values: the Kuretake Brush Writer in light gray ($7.50 at JetPens).  I had been considering these pens for awhile, but finally pulled the trigger after reading Stephanie Law's review.

The Brush Writer line offers a real brush tip set on a squeezable plastic body filled with water-based dye ink.

I tested this pen in violet as well as light gray in order to explore the "blendable" functionality, though if I buy any more of these it'll be the gray and blue-gray since violet and the other colors seem too highly saturated for regular sketching.  When will I ever want to draw a landscape or portrait in bright, straight-ahead purple?  I'd go with Copic's wine, but... not this purple.

Here's the really great thing about the Brush Writer:  the tip is an actual brush, not molded felt, and in fact it looks identical to my excellent Kuretake No. 13 Hair Brush Pen.

Comparing tips, top to bottom: Kuretake Fudegokochi gray pen which is truly a pen rather than a brush, Kuretake Brush Writer in light gray, Kuretake No. 13 hair brush pen loaded with a dark gray ink, and Pentel Color Brush in black.

In the sample above, it looks like the light gray ink in the Brush Writer is significantly lighter than the Fudegokochi.  Below it seems just slightly lighter.  This is all due to the Fudegokochi's variability- it is lighter on sized watercolor paper than on, say, plate bristol. Generally, though, the Fudegokochi is a little darker and warmer than the Brush Writer in light gray.  Both pens wash out with water quite easily, though washing over the Fudegokochi will often leave a trace of your original line. 

The body of the Brush Writer looks a lot like the Pentel Color Brushes which are widely available in the US.  My partner reported that he doesn't use his Pentel Color Brush because he was always hitting feast or famine with it - it would run dry, he'd squeeze the body for more ink, the tip would flood with ink to the point of being unusable, and then as soon as that was cleaned up it would be dry again.  When I tested his Pentel brush, that's exactly what it did for me as well.  I had no such problem with the Kuretake Color Brush. However, when I did experiment with squeezing the body for increased ink flow...

   

...the results were very different in the two Brush Writers.  The light gray brush did exactly what I wanted - it just got a little wetter, enough to change the line from brushy to solid.  The purple brush flooded so I got a blurb of ink on the brush tip and it made little lakes on the surface of my paper. When I squeezed it again, it seemed like ink and air bubbles were practically dripping out of the base around the brush tip.  The only Pentel Color Brush I have ever used behaved just like this purple Brush Writer when squeezed and it required constant squeezing to achieve ink flow, so even with this inconsistent behavior the Brush Writer is ahead... I just wish I could tell you they would all act like the light gray brush, because that one is spot on.  While I am going to recommend this pen, it would be a good idea to test yours first on scrap paper to see if your ink release mechanism is leaky.

The light gray pen had no problems.  The tip offers good control but the loose feel of a brush, and ink flow is good and controllable.   Use it over waterproof ink as a convenient form of gray watercolor. Let it dry, and you gain the ability to layer for a darker gray (though it never becomes waterproof).  I sometimes keep Noodler's Lexington Gray in my brush pen for this kind of work, but for sketching it's great to have a water soluble gray as well and this is a good one.  Sometimes I wished it was a bit darker, but this is "light gray" so perhaps I'll give the regular gray pen a try.

  

If you use the Brush Writer over other water-soluble inks or watercolor, it melds with them beautifully.  It was a lot of fun to use the pen this way.

 

As mentioned above, I got the Brush Writer in purple as well in order to test blending.  It worked fine - the drawing to the right was made with the purple pen, then the light gray was used to blur the purple into shadows - but this techniques works fine with other water-based inks too so I'd just as soon abandon the purple in favor of a fountain pen loaded with an ink of my choice.

The Fudegokochi is great as a pen that works well for line drawings in gray that can be wetted down to simulate watercolors. The Brush Writer has a different role - it won't write like a pen as well as the Fudegokochi, but if you want the do your work with an actual brush and blend into ink or watercolors, it's a great tool.  Just test for potential flooding first.

Review: Sailor Pocket Brush Pen - Super Fine

This review is by Kalina Wilson, who can also be found at Geminica.com.

The Sailor Pocket Brush Pen (Super Fine) isn't really a brush.  It's even less of a brush than most brush pens of the type.  In order to provide a line that could be described as "Super Fine", Sailor got rid of all the brush-like attributes and has simply provided a fine felt-tipped pen.

I don't mean that as a complaint, really.  The pen works well, the tip is performing well so far (I've seen one review that claims the tip doesn't hold its point for long, but haven't seen that problem yet myself), the ink is waterproof, and it seems to be a good workhorse product.  If I wanted to draw comics with a consistent line instead of the variability you can get from, say, the Tombow Fudenosuke which I unabashedly love, this super fine Sailor would be a decent option.

    

However, I will not buy this pen again.  At $2.25 (JetPens), it's the same price as the Tombow Fudenosuke.  The Tombow has a much nicer body made of recycled plastic with crisp, professional printing on the side; the Sailor is made of cheap plastic with sloppy silver printing on the side.  It just looks and feels cheap.  The Sailor Super Fine will give you a more consistent, thin line compared to the Tombow Fudenosuke's variability, but if consistent line width isn't your top priority, the Sailor brush loses its only advantage.  Personally, I just wasn't very excited to pick this one up, but will probably keep it around and use it until it runs dry because it  performs a simple function and works fine for what it does.

I haven't tried the other sizes of Sailor brushes, and they may be very different from the Super Fine so there is further investigation to be done.

If you're a fan of the Sailor Super Fine brush, I'd love to hear about your experiences with it and whether the tip has held up over time.

Note: Drawings on this page are based on Victorian mugshots, which are easily found online and lots of fun to browse.