The first 16 of my Inktober drawings were done with my blue Lamy Safari (medium nib), but I’ve been itching to try some other nibs and pens. I hold my pen slightly oddly – I rest it on my ring finger on my right hand, not my middle finger – and the shape of the Lamy barrel sometimes feels a little bit uncomfortable. Also, I’ve seen people raving about other types of nibs for drawing – fine is popular, then there are fude, flex and I’ve been wondering about an architect.
So, for my birthday, I asked for a set of three pens from Inkursive. He doesn’t seem to be offering it at the moment, but it was a stub, a fude and a fine nib on piston-filled demonstrator pens for less than £20.
It’s been really interesting. Turns out I don’t like the stub nib. Not enough control. I also didn’t really like drawing with the fine nib. It looked (to me) like I drew with a biro, so no point. But it’s great to write with, where the medium Lamy nib always felt a bit fat. I really liked drawing with the fude (not so much the writing). I really like having the variation of line width in a single pen!
The downside of the price of them turns out to have been the quality. The pens are fine, but the fine nib is a bit scratchy (will it wear in? we’ll see), and the stub and fude blob occasionally. Maybe I could tune them. They did the job though – I want to use a fude for drawing.
The obvious fude that I see reviewed and used everywhere is the Sailor Fude de Mannen. I’m being horribly picky, but I don’t like the way the pen looks. Call me shallow if you like. But I also saw some good reviews of the Hongdian black forest so I went to have a look for that. I found it on Amazon (no, not linking) and discovered that it comes in lots of colours! Not just black! But I just got three new pens, so I put a rainbow one on my wishlist and left it.
Clarkie bought it for me for Christmas. Yay! And she got her mum to buy me some of the Platinum Carbon Black water-resistant ink that again, I’ve seen lots of people using and then painting over. I really fancy trying that.
So yay! I’m finding I like turning the pen over a lot, and working with the very fine lines to start my drawings. Then I use the thicker lines as required. I expect a lot of the drawing challenge will be completed with this combo.
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