This ultra-fine brush tipped pen from Pentel—I don’t know what it’s called…The barrel reads: “Brush Sign Pen Artist.”
It’s one of their Sign Pens in that it has dye-based, fugitive, water-soluble ink, but unlike their other “sign pen” it doesn’t have a solid fiber tip—it has an ultra thin, ultra fine, brush with individual synthetic hairs!
And it’s great fun to sketch with.
The other day I sat down with orange, yellow ochre, blue, and gray and made five quick portraits in a Hahnemühle watercolor sketchbook. (I had only a few pages left of this “purse” journal and wanted to fill it up before the end of the year so I could count the pages in this year’s total. [Read how I index my journals to see why this is even a thing for me.])
I taped the five sketches I did in about 1:15 hours to share as a bonus video with my Tier 3 subscribers on Patreon/RozInterim. If you would like to see me use the pen please use that link to subscribe to my Patreon blog at the Tier 3 level.
Here’s what I can tell you:
I love this brush pen. The tip is responsive and allows really fine hairlines.
There is no chemical odor to the ink.
The ink flows really smoothly, allowing juicy brush strokes.
It contains dye-based, fugitive inks, that will always remain water-soluble so I recommend you scan your sketches and treat the digital scan as the original. Then just continue having fun sketching with them. Also, just them in situations where you don’t need the ink to be waterproof.
Of course you could mix and blend these together like you might with Tombow dual brush pens. I didn’t try any of that. I just wanted to see what that brush tip would do with straightforward sketching.
I’d recommend using it on a hot press paper, or a cold press paper which doesn’t have a lot of texture (some cold press papers are pretty smooth after all).
I’m still testing the different types of paper I’ll use this pen on.
Jet Pens calls this brush pen the “Pentel Artist Brush Sign Pen.”
I got mine at Wet Paint, and I don’t know what they call it there. I just know I went in and told Liz Carlson who was working that day, that I’d seen this really thin brush pen in a video…and we ran over to the pens together.
When I finished the fourth sketch I started making marks on the recycled watercolor paper beneath the journal, and then essentially doodled another version of the same person, though this time I wet the lines and pulled out shading. You can see that in the next two images. And in the final image of this post you can see the pen in relation to other members of the Pentel Brush Pen Family.
If you’re looking for a fun sketching tool and don’t need waterproof ink, think about checking out these fun pens. (And I’m not connected to Pentel, Wet Paint, or Jet Pens, except as a customer.)
(I’ll have more images sketched with this pen as I go forward. I’ll find out how long the ink lasts and how long it takes me to wear out the tip. I’ll report back. I just had so much fun with the pen I couldn’t wait to tell you about it.)
Click on any of the images and you can rotate through blow-up versions where you can see the lines clearly.
