Friday, January 12, 2007

I JUST BOUGHT A WATER PEN!

I just bought a water pen and I'm delighted with it! How long have these been around? How come I never heard of them before? I only discovered it because Enrico, who runs the Sketchcrawl website did a watercolor sketch of it (above). He seemed to awear by it so I made a trip to the art store to see what he was talking about. Man, am I glad I did!

What it is, is a refillable brush pen loaded with water. If you have a little portable set of watercolors like the Windsor & Newton set above then you're all set to color pictures on the move, any time, anywhere. No fuss, no mess, the brush has it's own water. It's easy to clean and easy to remove the old color to make way for a new one.

I like funny subjects so my pictures aren't likely to look like the ones above. I'm just grateful to Sketchcrawl for turning me on to the materials. The sketchbook he recommended looked pretty interesting too. I never used the Mikado pencil.

13 comments:

Mitchel Kennedy said...

Yeeeaaaa! They're great, aren't they? I just discovered mine a little more than a month ago. I filled it with diluted ink so I can do washes with my pen sketches.

Happy painting!

max said...

Looks great, I'll go and look for one today.

Rob Bodnar said...

Yes, they are great, I picked some up over the holiday.

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Kali Fontecchio said...

Alright, Eddie, let's see your experiments. I will not be happy until I do.

David Germain said...

Thank you for this post Eddie.
I'm planning to do some water colours in the near future myself. I was going to buy a whole bunch of brushes but instead I think I'll try that water pen.

2 questions:

1. How much does it cost? (I know you'll probably only know it in American dollars but I'll try to roughly convert it).

2.Can it be found in any art supplies store?

Eddie Fitzgerald said...

David: The brush (brand = Yasutomo)cost $8 and came in three different sizes. Get the large size.

David Germain said...

Thanks, Eddie! B)

Unknown said...

Those look cool. I'll have to check around here... stationary and art supply stores are everywhere in Japan, so I'm sure these are available.

It seems like for sketching on the go, you should have more than one... several, in fact... all loaded with different colors?

Eddie Fitzgerald said...

Joel: Good grief, no! Putting color into the pen makes it an inefficient marker. The pen should only contain water. For color you carry around a tiny box of watercolors or a little Altoid box full of little gouache tubes.

Gabriel said...

i've lusted for a water pen for ages, but you just can't find them in my country. And if you could, it would cost a kidney.

Anonymous said...

After he gets impeached, George W. Bush will market the hell out of kidney pens.

Andreas said...

I finally got one of those thar water brush pens. Mine is made by Niji. Picked them up from dickblick.com couldn't find a good enough art store in San Diego that carried them. I picked up from a Japanese store some ink pens of the same design (pre-filled with ink). They are fun to use too. Cleaner than trying to ink with brush and a bottle of ink.