There’s a moment when your brush pen starts to run out of ink, but it’s not quite dry yet. In fact if you let it rest for a little bit part way through a drawing it seems to get a second wind in only a few minutes.
If you can’t wait that long, simply have another almost dried out brush pen at the ready, to sketch with while the first pen has a rest with the cap on.
My point is, it’s amazing how much ink they really hold.
I’ve written about this many times before, but when I look at sketches like this one and see the dry lines I’m reminded of how fun it is to sketch with this pen, even when dry. And I simply want to remind you all too.
There is a moment in this pen’s life when it actually makes lines so light, but consistent, that you can do a whole sketch in ink and from the scan it almost looks like it’s graphite.
Too much fun.
Don’t give up on your pens. Keep them around. Let them rest. Let them surprise you with new energy when you pull them out again.
Almost sounds like a life lesson. “When your well starts to run dry, run to another well and keep on keepin’ on!”
I think that’s a good way to think about it. Creativity is all around and we can keep pulling it in.
Does it help to store these brush end down? I tend to store mine brush end up, but when they start to get dry, I turn them the other way, yet it doesn’t seem to help. Maybe gravity is not what they need to keep the last ink from flowing to the brush…?
My intuition would tell me it would help to store the Sakura Pigma Professional Brush Pen FB tip down in a jar or pencil holder, because gravity would then work to move the ink to the tip.
But I don’t store them that way. I store them tip up because the id is on the top of the cap and and I can look down and find them there.
OR I store them flat, leave them lying horizontally on my workspace. (Working pens tend to live that way in the house, and only go into the jars when they are near the end of their lives.)
Having gone through hundreds of these pens I can’t say that I’ve noticed any difference between how I store them and how much use I get out of them. I did, in the early days of using them set up a test to see if storing tip down, vertically, would help, but it wasn’t conclusive.
As a fiber tipped pen I would say that it would make sense to store them vertically, tip down, but I can’t point to any evidence for that. If you look at what I produced from those early test pens, vertical vs. horizontal, it was roughly the same.And quite a lot of paper was covered.
So it seems Tina, our experience with the pen is the same. And when it gets dry-ish and I rest a particular pen, it rests very well just horizontally, so I don’t even put it tip down in that situation.
All I can say is that I love these pens and think they are an excellent value and the ink is immediately waterproof on all but the most heavily sized papers (and then you just have to wait a moment before going in with watercolor washes), so I’m a happy customer and can’t recommend them enough.
Maybe I’m lazy too? I get so much line-age from them that there is no incentive for me to be strict about how I store them.
(Because of carrying pens in a vertical pencil case in my pack or purse I think it’s just a habit.)