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.

Review: A Uniball Double-Sided Pocket Brush Pen meets a Special Moleskine

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

I was recently given this adorable little Limited Edition Pac Man Moleskine notebook as a gift.  Despite the book's obvious charm I didn't have much idea what to do with it.  The pages are very thin.  Most ink sinks right through, and watercolor is out of the question. 

Since the paper wasn't inspiring, I coated some pages with acrylic paint as an experiment, but this added a new challenge since some of the acrylic was glossy and wouldn't take ink.

Enter the Uniball Pocket Brush Pen.

This pen was recommended by Pen Addict commenter and pen/pencil blogger ThirdeYe in response to my Kuretake Hair Brush review.  I wasn't optimistic, but gave it a shot in the Moleskine and it quickly came out on top!  

The Uniball lays down a nice wet line that is fantastic for quick, loose sketching - similar to the Pilot brushes but with a faster dry time.  You can see from some smearing below (center image, lower right) that this was still an issue due to all that ink, but the Pilot brushes were unusable for me for this reason and the Uniball was a big improvement.

You can see that the brush is visible through the paper, but it's not bad - my other brush pens were much worse in this regard.  The large molded foam tip is very flexible with no weird springback issues such as I've had with some disposable Kuretakes and the Copic brushes. It is so fun to work with that these days I keep it in my hand while watching TV and am constantly freezing frames for quick sketches.

Additionally, the pen works great over acrylic, even glossy acrylic.

  
 

I don't switch to the small tip often (actually I kept forgetting it was there) but it works well - not sure I'd choose it above the Tombow Fudenosuke Soft for normal use but it's convenient to have it on the other end of the pen.  Both caps are postable.

Now we come to the bad news.

When I spoke with friend and urban sketcher Alanna Randall  about this pen, she reported that hers quickly became unwieldy due to a frayed tip on the larger brush.  Not two days later, mine had become identical to hers, and started giving a weaker, dryer line - here's a post-fray sketch.

Besides this tip issue, the major drawback of the pen is that it is not waterproof.  I love it for quick sketches, but wouldn't use it for longer drawings that might later want watercolors.

 In conclusion, I have to assume this pen's tip can only last through perhaps a week of moderately heavy use - if that.  I'd feel a little better about the short lifespan if the pen were made out of recycled materials, which it isn't.  However, it works better than any other pen I have as a quick, wet brush for use on regular Moleskine notebook paper and over acrylic paint.  I recommend this pen as a lot of fun, just be prepared for it to be short-lived.

Review: Gray Kuretake Fudegokochi Brush Pen

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

The Kuretake Fudegokochi gray brush pen is a water-soluble pen with a soft felt tip and middle-toned gray ink that seems especially suitable for use in drawing.  

The pen costs around $3 and has been a real workhorse.  It does have one quirk, however, which is that sometimes upon opening the cap I find the ink has beaded up around the nib like so: 

Luckily, the design of the pen keeps me from putting my hands in the ink, so it just stays where it is around the nib.  

The ink is not only water soluble, it's very water soluble.  Once the ink is down it can be washed out like watercolors, as long as it's used on sized paper such as watercolor or mixed media paper - or this vintage accounting ledger paper I've been trying out after meeting urban sketcher and illustrator Lapin.  

(Actually, this drawing captures another urban sketcher trick as well; it was Liz Steel that clued me in to wearing an absorbent wristband as a convenient alternative to a watercolors rag.  Mine is actually the top of an old cotton sock, and it works great.)

But back to the Fudegokochi!  In the drawing of my hand, I used the Fudegokochi first to sketch and add shadow, then added black line and watercolors, washing away the gray lines in most places and sometimes adding more back in to darken.  You can still see the initial gray shading in some places, and it's also influencing the tone of the watercolors in a way that I really enjoy. 

My other favorite way to use this pen is to imply distance, using the gray to add buildings that are farther afield and a warmer tone in the foreground.  That's what I did with this drawing that you already saw in the last review, pairing the gray pen with J. Herbin's Lie de Thé fountain pen ink. You can see that the water solubility again worked to my advantage.

In case you can't tell, I really love using this pen as a fast way to add soft gray to a drawing, and highly recommend it for this purpose.