My Flock of Fountain Pens for the Pelikan Hubs 2024

We just had the 2024 Pelikan Hubs event and I wanted to talk about which Pelikan fountain pens I brought with me to the event, and to note a few things that may be useful for those looking to get into Pelikan fountain pens.

This was my flock:

From left to right they are:

Pelikan M800 Blue O Blue – one of the most expensive pens in my collection, and one that I (partially) got as a gift for my birthday. This pen has an 18 Karat fine nib that is soft and springy. Note: Some of Pelikan’s gold nibs are softer than others, so it’s worth testing the pen out before you buy it, especially if you’re not used to Pelikan nibs. This pen has a semi transparent blue swirly body and a typical Pelikan wide and juicy nib.
Pelikan M805 Ocean Swirl – gorgeous, gorgeous pen that draws attention every time I use it. The depth and shade of the material is something else, and the palladium trim and rhodium plated 18k nib work very well with the turquoise and black shades of this pen’s body. This pen also has a fine 18k nib but this one is much firmer than the one in the Blue O Blue.
Pelikan M620 Place De La Concorde – so, so glad I got this pen though it was expensive for me at the time. This was part of Pelikan’s city series and the only Pelikan I have in the M600 size, which is just a shade longer than the M400. There’s marbling in this pen’s stripes, as is befitting its name, and the 18K M nib is wide and juicy and of a standard Pelikan nib firmness.
Pelikan M400 W. Germany vintage black and brown tortoise shell – I brought this pen so that people could compare the old tortoise shell design to its modern counterpart. There’s just one band on the cap, the bottom and top finials are more rounded and there’s the old Pelikan logo engraved (not screen printed) onto the finial. The nib design is also completely different, though it still feels like a standard fine 14k Pelikan nib (wide and on the firm side).
Pelikan M400 white tortoise shell – this is the modern counterpart of the previous pen, and it has a 14k medium nib that is on the soft side. Both the black and white tortoise shell pens have semi transparent pen bodies so you can easily see the pen level through them.
Pelikan M100 storm trooper – on the rarer side of Pelikans, this steel nibbed fountain pen has a medium nib that feels just as good as Pelikan’s gold nibs. While I understand why Pelikan didn’t want to continue making M100 still nibbed fountain pens, I kind of wish they would have. These could have been slightly higher end alternatives to Lamy’s Al Stars and Safaris – a step down from the M200.
Pelikan M320 Pearl – the rarest Pelikan in my flock, and always a crowd pleaser. This fountain pen is tiny, and came as part of a set with Pelikan brown ink and a nice presentation box. I bought it more than 10 years ago in Berlin, and nobody was interested in them because of the pen’s size. It’s a piston filler, a fantastically well made pen and it has a very soft 14k medium nib.

Here’s a writing sample for all these pens:

Writing sample on a Pelikan Hub 2022 notepad

Did you go to a Pelikan Hub this year? If so, which pens did you bring with you?

Pelikan Edelstein Ink of the Year Golden Lapis Review and Pelikan Hubs 2024

Yesterday Pelikan celebrated their annual Pelikan Hubs event, and we had a local Pelikan Hub. Since 2014 the German pen company has invited its fans to gather in groups all around the world and for one evening celebrate their love of Pelikan fountain pens and ink. The events are well organized, with a local volunteer in each country organizing the Hub location and orchestrating the event. And every year Pelikan gives Hub participants a generous gift for their participation.

This year was no different, and Pelikan Hub participants got a full sized bottle of Pelikan’s premium ink collection, Edelstein, in the Ink of the Year 2024 colour: Golden Lapis.

Pelikan Edelstein Ink of the Year Golden Lapis

As is customary with luxury inks, the bottle is a glass work of art:

The extra thick base and wide opening work well with Pelikan Souveran pens which tend to be wider barrelled and often difficult to impossible to fill with certain ink maker’s narrow and tall ink bottles. With certain Sailor ink bottles and Diamine’s 30ml plastic bottles there’s a risk of your M400 or M800 not fitting into the bottle or of tipping the bottle while trying to fill the pen with ink. There’s no risk of that with Edelstein bottle design, though when the ink level runs very low its likely you’ll need to get creative when trying to fill your pens with ink.

The golden cap has the modern Pelikan logo on it, with a Pelican and one chick:

I filled a Pelikan M205 Petrol Marbled EF pen with the ink and used it for the swab and writing sample below. Here’s Golden Lapis on a Col-O-Ring card:

We got a nice A6 writing pad with bristol thick fountain pen friendly paper in it as part of the Pelikan Hub 2024 gifts. The paper is great though I wish there wasn’t a Pelikan logo on each page mostly because it takes so much space. The paper is thick enough for both sides of it to be useful, so it’s a shame to have to flip the page over and write only on one side if you want the full A6 page to yourself.

The A6 notepad that we received as part of the Pelikan Hub

Pelikan Edelstein Golden Lapis is a gorgeous ink, period. The base rich, turquoise-y blue reminds me of Pilot Iroshizuku Asa Gao and that is high praise. The colour is rich, vibrant and has a good amount of shading that sets it apart from standard blues. To this fantastic base ink Pelikan added lots of fine, golden shimmer, and the result is stunning. Viewed directly from above the shimmer is present but subtle, oftentimes taking on the look of sheen:

But tilt the page slightly and the amount of gold in each letter makes the page glow:

Tilt it to the other side and the shimmer “vanishes”, which allows you to see the lovely blue ink’s colour shading much better:

Pelikan Edelstein Golden Lapis is a spectacular ink that manages to be unique in a market overflowing with blue inks with gold shimmer. The combination of the base colour, its shading properties, and the good spread of the shimmer make this an ink worth having in your collection if you’re a shimmer ink fan.

As for the Hub I participated in: it was fantastically well organized and I had a lot of fun meeting other fountain pen enthusiasts and seeing the pens they brought.

SketchingNow Travel Sketching: Lines

So I just finished the first week of Liz Steel’s SketchingNow Travel Sketching course. I wrote about my material list for this course here and about the beginning of the first week here.

Liz started the week by suggesting that we approach sketching while travelling using a 7 lines principle: sketch the scene in 7 lines, which you can then flesh out to a full sketch. While I managed to do this for the first three Eiffel Tower sketches, I started to struggle once we got to complex buildings like the Big Ben.

This went well – Eiffel Tower with 7 lines as a start.

Here’s my two initial attempts with 7 lines, and then where I moved to my usual approach, which is trying to break a scene down to simple shapes (square, circle, triangle, etc).

I then sketched the next assigned subjects using my own approach:

At which point I realised several things:

I wasn’t really learning anything new this way.
I hadn’t given the new approach enough of a chance before giving up on it.
The 7 lines rule isn’t rigid. It’s an artificial limitation that’s supposed to encourage observation and decision making up front, not to have me counting every pencil or pen mark.

So with that in mind, I made two decisions:

I can use continuous/complex/compound lines as part of the 7 lines. Liz uses them herself, and as they are quick to sketch and require acute observation they remain in the spirit of the rule.
I can use up to 10 lines if I felt that it was necessary to convey perspective or complicated shapes.

Then I went back and sketched the following using this approach:

These came out much better than in the first attempt.

Then I sketched two Melbourne scenes:

The Auction Rooms came out particularly effective- 7 lines allowed me to outline the main interest point of the scene (the roof line), and also to outline a car, so I have a feel for the scale of the buildings.

I then sketched two local scenes. The top left scene was of two little egrets waiting to be fed by the local fishmonger. I got the tree, the egrets, the buildings and with two extra lines, the windows.

The bottom sketch was of a heron on a boat in the river. I got the river, the boat, the heron, and the buildings behind the tree line. I would have been very comfortable finishing both sketches either on location or from reference photos with this strong starting point.

The final sketch was of a very complicated building in Paris. I added a few more lines just for reference for where the columns are. Like the rest of these sketches it’s not 100% accurate, and there are slightly wonky bits, but I’m looking for speed and to capture the essence of a scene when I’m travel sketching, not for photorealistic reproduction.

I really struggled with the 7 lines idea at first, but then I allowed myself a bit more freedom within this framework and I found it to be very useful and also an easy idea to carry around with me as I look for interesting things to sketch. If I can envision the scene in 7 lines and it looks interesting with just those lines, then it’s likely worth sketching.

Coming up next is shapes, where we start to work with colour. I’m curious to see what the results will be.

Sketching Now Travel Sketching: Eiffel Tower and Big Ben

So the first week of actual lessons in Liz Steel’s Sketching Now Travel Sketching course started and already there’s been a slight change of materials.

As this week will be entirely focused on line drawings, I’m switching to a non-watercolour sketchbook. For the first part of this week’s exercise, which includes working from reference photos, I’m using the Midori MD Cotton notebook in A4. It’s neither a proper sketchbook nor the A5 size format that Liz recommended, but as she also requested to upload as few photos as possible to this week’s gallery (and no more than 6) and as we have quite a bit of work to do, I decided to at least use a large notebook so I can fit more than one or two sketches on a page and thus avoid the need to stitch photos.

We have several scenes we need to sketch as quickly as possible, starting with just 7 lines to define the scene. The 7 lines idea worked quite well with the Eiffel Tower but broke down completely for me once we got into a complex building like the Big Ben. That’s when I decided to just work with shapes and let the architecture details on the building help me determine its length and proportions.

Generic rules like “start with just 7 lines” are nice ideas on paper, but they oftentimes break down when we’re faced with reality. I think that the 7 lines idea would actually slow me down when sketching on location (it slowed me considerably while I was at home, and it failed completely with the Big Ben), but the basics of contour, shapes, perspective, proportion hints work no matter what.

I will try the 7 lines for the rest of the week, to see if it’s just a matter of practice, but I suspect that it isn’t.

Sketching Now Travel Sketching Course: Material List

I’ve started Liz Steel‘s Sketching Now Travel Sketching course this week, and so I’ll be posting about my progress throughout the course.

I travel a few times a year and while I already sketch during my travels, I want to improve my speed and gain enough confidence to sketch in less than ideal conditions. I rarely sketch standing up, and I don’t feel comfortable sketching while I’m waiting in line, for instance, and these are useful skills to have if you plan to sketch while on a trip that isn’t dedicated to sketching.

As usual with Liz Steel’s excellent courses, the first part is an introduction which includes an overview of the course, setting personal goals for the course, materials list/discussion and a review of where you are starting from.

I have decided to take a different approach to the materials requirements for this course. I have a pretty compact and set travel sketching set of materials, but I’m allowing myself to expand on it and change it a bit to experiment with some new techniques.

The first big change is the sketchbook I’m using. It’s a Hahnemühle A5 Watercolour Book, which includes 200gsm fine grain paper. I’ve never used it before, but as I regularly use the Stillman and Birn Alpha that Liz is using for the course and I’m not a huge fan of it, I decided to give this paper a spin instead. If it works it would be ideal for travel sketching, as it’s thin and lightweight, the paper takes watercolour washes much better than the Alpha, and I appreciate the elastic closure and hard covers. They are very convenient additions that should help me sketch while standing, and keep the sketches safe while I carry the notebook in my bag.

I’ve also changed my watercolour palette somewhat (it’s the bottom palette, not the top one). As I’m still not certain about it, I’m not fully documenting it at the moment. This course isn’t geared heavily towards watercolour, but I tend to like to sketch as quickly as possible on location when travelling, take a few reference photos and complete the sketch with watercolours later that evening.

The palette I’m using is the bottom one, with 24 colours, both Schmincke and Daniel Smith.

For the first time I’m adding watercolour pencils to my travel sketching kit. As Liz recommended I have a triad (yellow, red, blue), a green, a brown, a grey, a dark, and while she recommended having two lights, I have three. Why? Because having quickly available greens is very useful, the pink is useful for skin tones, and the ochre is too generally useful to be left out. All of these pencils are Faber-Castell Albrecht Durer.

Dry media is also more than double what I normally carry on me. Here the point is to experiment, and it’s very likely that I will say goodbye to several of these tools during the course. I normally use only Staedler Pigment Liners in 0.3, 0.5 and sometimes 0.8 when I sketch, but here I’ll be adding a Tomboq Fudenosuke brush pen to the mix, two fountain pens (a Lamy Safari and a Sailor Fude both with De Atramentis Document Black), three pencils (Faber Catelll 9000 2B, Rotring 600 0.7 and for the first time ever, Faber Castell 4B graphite aquarelle), an eraser and a pencil sharpener. I’ll also be using a medium waterbrush instead of my usual fine one.

All of these tools will be carried in a Nock Co case, with the exception of the watercolour tin and rag, and a brush case.

I don’t think that I’ll be using these too much during this course, but these are my travel ready brushes. I keep them in a Ti2 design tube with glue tac at the bottom to prevent the brushes from moving. The brushes are Windsor Newton Series 7 numbers 4 and 7 and Rosemary & Co dagger brush 772.