March 2024 in Reading

I read four books in March (and started reading Paul Auster’s mammoth of a book 4321). Three of them were very good (Prospero’s Cell, The Sisters Brothers and Blood) and one that was a bit of a disappointment (Slow Productivity) mostly because I was already familiar with the concepts in it. All in all not a bad reading record for the month.

Prospero’s Cell: A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corfu, Lawrence Durrell

This isn’t a guidebook, nor a travel book, nor purely a work of non-fiction. Durrell lived in Corfu for a few years before WWII (his brother, Gerald Durrell wrote several books about their time there, the most famous of which is the wonderful “My Family and Other Animals”. I’ve read that book so many times I know parts of it by heart) with his wife Nancy and a group of artistically minded friends. This book pretends to be a guide to the island only in its title and a few peculiar appendixes in the end. In reality it’s a stylized diary of a year and a half of Durrell’s time there, just before the war broke out. Durrell is a master of description, and for that alone the book is worth the read. It’s a sliver of a book that captures in a pile of amber words a time, a place and a community that now no longer exist. It was written while Durrell was exiled in Alexandria, and you can feel the melancholy and mourning for a golden age that was once his and is now lost.

The Sisters Brothers, Patrick deWitt

I’ve had this book for so long on my reading list I managed to buy both a digital and physical copy of it. The design of the paperback is wonderful, by the way, so I recommend getting it if you can (that’s the edition I ended up reading).

Charlie and Eli Sisters are brothers and professional killers in 1851 frontier America. They’ve been sent to California to kill an elusive prospector, Hermann Kermit Warm, at the request of their employer, the enigmatic, powerful and cruel Commodore. The novel is a sort of Noir Don Quixote/Cohen Brothers telling of the story of their trip there and back, from the point of view of Eli Sisters, the younger brother. Eli is a fascinating character, and much of the interest in the story is seeing him grow more self-aware and conscious of his life and choices. The novel manages to be funny and tragic, cruel and heartwarming at the same time. It has a lot to say about agency, morality, violence and the rush for gold vs quality of life, and it goes about it without preaching to the reader.

A truly original novel that is hard to put down, and manages to be both entertaining and illuminating. Well worth the read.

Slow Productivity:The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, Cal Newport

I’ve read Newport’s Digital Minimalism and Deep Work, which I liked and utilized to great effect, and his So Good They Can’t Ignore You, which isn’t as good as the others. I also listen to his excellent podcast, Deep Questions, and so I pre-ordered this book the minute he started talking about it.

Herein lies the paradox of this book. If you’re a regular listener of Newport’s podcast there’s very little in this book for you beyond a few anecdotes. Newport has basically workshopped and talked about all the ideas in Slow Productivity for months on his podcast, going into much more depth and implementation specifics than he does in this book.

If you aren’t a listener of his podcast, AND you’re a knowledge worker with some level of control over your schedule and tasks, then Slow Productivity is worth reading. You’ll learn about pseudo-productivity, its origin and its breaking point, and you’ll learn about an alternative framework: slow productivity. “Do fewer things. Work at a natural pace. Obsess over quality”.

Where the book fails and podcast triumphs is in the implementation of these ideas. The book does give you a few ideas to try out, but through a much lengthier discussion in the podcast, plus real-world questions that listeners asked you get a better idea of how this would work in real life.

As I’ve been listening to the podcast for a few months, I already started implementing these ideas at my job (before the book was published). I work on only one project at a time, the rest stays in the backlog. I was told to cut corners and do a mediocre job on my current project in an attempt to rush it, but I deflected that request. Once I presented my initial results, the tune changed – this was high quality work! Totally worth the work and the wait, keep it up!

Bottom line: skip if you’re a podcast listener/viewer, read if you feel overwhelmed at your job and want an introduction to an alternative productivity framework that’s not as frenetic as the normal knowledge worker’s fare.

Blood: The Science, Medicine and Mythology of Menstruation, Dr Jen Gunter

Like many other readers that reviewed this book, I wish I had access to it when I started menstruating. Dr Gunter is as usual informative, caring and entertaining at the same time, which is quite an accomplishment. Complex medical processes are explained with great clarity and compassion, and the reader is left with a LOT of very useful information to use when making medical choices or advocating for themselves in medical settings. This and Dr Gunter’s The Menopause Manifesto are must reads and treasure mines of solid, well-researched and vetted medical information in a world full of medical disinformation and misinformation. There are a few pages here that would have saved me months of needless anguish during chemo.

An absolute gem of a book, one to read cover to cover and then reference in times of need.

Have you read anything good or interesting last month?

Vintage Radius Comet Fountain Pen Review

In April 2010 back when I was relatively new to collecting vintage fountain pens, I purchased a vintage Radius Comet on the Fountain Pen Network. The body was brown laminated celluloid, just like Parker striped Vacumatics, and you could see the ink levels through the stripes, just like with a Parker Vacumatic, and it had a jewel on the cap, just like a Parker Vacumatic. It was, however, a piston filler, unlike the Parker Vacumatic, and it had a superflex gold nib, also unlike a Parker Vacumatic. So even though I had never heard of the brand before and there was very little information about them to be found, I took the risk and bought the pen. It cost €120 shipped.

The pen was obviously user-grade, as there was brassing and tarnishing on the hardware, a lot of micro-scratches on the body, and some ambering in parts of the celluloid. It’s still a good looking pen, though.

The stripes had darkened with time, but some still have their original glow

The design of the clip and the jewel on the end of the cap was clearly influenced by the ultra popular Parker Vacumatic.

The jewel on top, a clear copy of the Parker design.

Even though the celluloid has darkened and ambered with time, you can still clearly see the ink levels through the stripes. As a piston filler it has an impressive ink capacity, which works well with the flex nib, as it can lay down a good amount of ink when fully flexed.

You can see the ink levels through the stripes.

It works perfectly – the filling system is and always was a joy to use, and the nib… Well, the literally don’t make nibs like this any more:

When you apply no pressure it’s a wonderfully smooth fine nib, but when fully flexed it goes up to broad/double broad territory. The feed keeps up with the ink flow with ease, and I’ve never had a hard start with it, ever.

Writing sample on Midori MD paper with Diamine Amaranth

Leonardo has revived the brand in recent years, and now you can buy a brand new Radius with a cartridge/converter system, resin body and (obviously non-flexible) steel nib for around €150, not including shipping. No modern pen manufacturer is capable of creating a pen like the vintage Radius or any of its contemporaries, neither in body material, nibs or filling systems at the price that they were once made. It’s a question of both volume and lost knowledge and tooling, which means that the vintage and new Radius pens have very little to do with each other beyond having the same brand name.

Buying vintage is always a risk in a way buying modern pens isn’t, but the value for money still cannot be beaten. I might buy a modern Radius at some point in the future (I like their designs and I’m curious about the pens), but I have no doubt that in terms of looks, nib and filling system it won’t be able to hold a candle to its well-worn and well-loved vintage namesake.

February 2024 in Reading

Balthazar, Lawrence Durrell

The second of the Alexandria Quartet this book is much easier to read than the first one, Justine. While it is written from the point of view of the same narrator as Justine was, Balthazar undoes and rewrites significant parts of the previous narrative. This isn’t an accident, but a very deliberate, very well thought out move by Durrell. He’s not merely creating an unreliable narrator, he’s creating a narrator that doesn’t see the full extent of the reality he’s living in, and then has a trusted friend come in and fill in the gaps, correct him, reveal truths he had no way of knowing. As Balthazar’s insights force the narrator to reflect again on what happened in Alexandria at the time, more memories begin to surface and so a few new characters join us (chief among them the enigmatic Mountolive) and a few others get revealed in surprising ways. Nessim becomes fleshed out and more human and relatable as we see him with his brother and mother at the family estate. Scobie shows hidden parts of himself that make him tragically human, and not just a comic relief. Justine too becomes less of a fable and more of an actual person, and Clea gets a bit more depth (though she’s still something of a mythical creature here). Nessim’s brother Narouz and his mother Leila are fantastic characters in and of themselves, and the narrative comes to life with their addition and with the fact that we get some distance from the overly cerebral and neurotic narrator. Balthazar brings high romance to the story, an air of a Victor Hugo novel at times, and so this book flows more easily, is much kinder in its demands from the reader than Justine was.

Mountolive, Lawrence Durrell

The third novel in the Alexandria Quartet and the one I was most looking forward to reading. While Justine set the basic story and introduced the main characters, and Balthazar gave new depth, perspective and meaning to their actions, Mountolive overturns them both by giving the characters motives and political context.

Without spoiling the novel, Mountolive introduces David Mountolive, the new British Ambassador to Egypt and Leila’s former lover. Leila is Nessim and Narouz’s mother, and she and her family become the heart of the story, with Darley (the narrator and protagonist of the previous two novels) barely appearing in Mountolive. The narrator changes, pace changes, the love story changes, even the genre changes in this novel compared to the other two, and Durrell has done a magnificent job with this switch. You don’t see it coming, but once he starts revealing what really took place you see that he’s very quietly laid all the groundwork for it there.

Mountolive himself is a fantastic character, and Narouz… I tip my hat to Durrell for creating a larger than life character that could be at home in a Victor Hugo novel and yet is completely believable.

It’s worth reading Justine and Balthazar just to read Mountolive, and no, you can’t skip them just to read this.

Clea, Lawrence Durrell

The fourth and final book of the Alexandria Quartet Clea takes place a few years after the events in the first three books (which happen simultaneously), during and immediately after WWII. It’s the final layer of a multi-layered narrative, one that reveals more about the characters, allows them to mature, evolve, create new ties and explore old ones. Scobie gains a deserved mythical status, Darley grows up, Clea becomes more human and less of an angel in the shape of a woman, and Justine, Nessim and even Narouz get their final say. Above all this is a farewell to Alexandria, which is arguably the main character in this quartet. The city looms large over the life and events of these novels, providing much more than a setting. Durrell is a master at evoking the spirit of place, and here he is at the heights of his powers, writing what is likely one of the most nuanced, multi-layered, tormented and transcendent boy-meets-girl stories ever written.

The Alexandria Quartet

The Alexandria Quartet as a whole is a difficult and demanding set of novels to read – it makes demands on the reader, and some of the content is hard for both contemporary and current audiences. Yet Durrell isn’t creating a picture postcard of a city, or of his characters. They both have teeth and a significant underbelly and have no problem showing either one. Characters you like show mean, petty and intolerant streaks, and the city is both magnificently charming and a seat of horrors beyond description at the same time.

When it comes to reading demanding books, the question always is “was it worth it”? In the case of The Alexandria Quartet it most certainly is. The dizzying narrative of Justine, that gives to credence to the linear narrative, is overturned by Balthazar, which adds order, depth, insight to it, and a multitude of various contexts. Mountolive adds political and social context and depth over what Balthazar provided, and another set of love stories, this time ones coloured by tragedy. Then Clea breathes time over the trilogy, allowing characters to mature, evolve, reinvent themselves. The artist lost in Mountolive inspires a wedding and two artists found in Clea, and Justine finds her true calling once again.

My only regret with this quartet is that I read it on a kindle. These books require paging backwards and forwards (especially Justine), and they need deep reading not fast reading. I have several more of Durrell’s books that I plan on reading, and all of them are in print format. He is a writer to savour, not to rush through.

February 2024 in Pens and Paper

I started the month ready to spend the first half of it in hospital, with my dad. So the fountain pens I chose were all expendable pocketable pens that I was willing to have stolen (apart from the Schon Design Pocket 6 which was a leftover from January and never left my desk). So that meant I inked 4 Kaweco Sport fountain pens using various ink cartridges that I had on hand.

The portable lineup:

Once my dad got out of hospital and back home, I decided to celebrate by “shopping” from my collection. I inked up a Parker 51 Plum (use the good china!), a Parker Vacumatic, a Franklin Christoph 45L Turqish (spelled like that on their site) Crush that I had purchased but hadn’t inked before, and a vintage Radius Comet (because I heard that the brand was being revived).

The Franklin Christoph EF nib isn’t the best companion to the Eau de Nil as the ink tends to dry in the nib, causing hard start issues. The Radius is a flexible nib of the vintage kind, which means it’s really flexible and not just springy. It also rattles, which makes me not carry it around with me — it stays at home at my desk. The Leonardo is a beautiful pen with a beautiful ink that I refilled immediately — the only Inkvent 2023 ink I did that with. The two vintage Parkers are phenomenal, as usual. The extra fine nib on the vacumatic somehow really well with Diamine Ash, though I was worried at first that the combination would be too light to be readable. The Parker 51 Aeromatic is a treat to use. It’s the rare Plum colour, and it’s got a fantastic nib (as all 51’s have) which pairs very nicely with the Monteblanc The Beatles Psychedelic Purple.

In terms of paper I’ve been using Kokuyo A4 KB paper which I cut to half size (so A5) to manage my daily to do list. The paper is relatively cheap and very fountain pen friendly. I’m also able to use both sides of the page despite there being some show through.

Kokuyo A4 KB paper cut in half to A5 size. This is why standards are great.

I’ve got a Field Notes Heavy duty on my desk at home and at work, and I just bought a new stock of them. These are where I jot down quick notes, phone call details, doodles during boring meetings. When they’re filled up they get tossed out as nothing in them is permanent — everything important in them moves to somewhere else as I work my way through them.

Field Notes Heavy Duty pocket spiral bound reporter notebooks

I have finally found a use for my Dingbats notebooks (beyond giving them away as gifts, as I have in the past): this lined purple hippo one is my blog notebook. I discovered that I have a much easier, much quicker time writing blog posts if I first draft them on paper, and this is where I do it in. I’ll likely write a dedicated post to this notebook soon.

Apart from them I still use the notebooks I used last month.

Pencils

I’ve been using the Drehgriffel Nr. 2 as my daily driver. I use pencils extensively to plan, as my plans tend to change, and there’s something about this solid little mechanical pencil that makes me want to use it.

Apart from that I brought two pencils into the rotation, to try to use. One is from my last purchase from the late and great C.W. Pencils Enterprise, and it’s the “Big Dipper” J.R. Moon Pencil Co 600. It’s an oversized pencil, the kind of pencil that kids who are learning to write are expected to use. I’ve been having pretty significant neuropathy in my hands lately and I thought that this would be nice and easy to use, as after all it’s designed for kids just learning to develop their fine motor skills. So far it’s been a disappointment – the eraser and ferrule make it very top heavy, and I’ve been having a hard time manipulating it. I can’t imagine kids using this pencil and having an easy time with it. I like the over the top red foil with gold writing look though, so I haven’t given up on it yet.

The second pencil is a Blackwing Volumes 56, the baseball themed one. The core is soft and dark, and I’ve been using it for quick and loose sketches. I’m trying to ease into one week 100 people by training myself to work faster than I normally would.

What did you use in February? Any planner changes? Pencil revelations? Pen preferences?

Leuchtturm1917 A5 dot grid comparison: standard, 120 gsm, Bullet Journal

A few months ago I started using the Leuchtturm1917 Bullet Journal – at first as it was intended, but very quickly it turned into a general weekly and quarterly planner for me. As I neared the halfway mark of the notebook I decided to purchase a replacement, but instead of buying another Bullet Journal I purchased a 120gsm dot grid Leuchtturm A5 notebook. The paper was the same in both notebooks, and as I didn’t use any of the Bullet Journal features and the 120gsm notebooks are slightly cheaper, I thought that it would be a good replacement.

While I was still waiting for my 120gsm notebook to arrive, I happened to find a light grey standard (or 80gsm) dot grid A5 Leuchtturm notebook at a local store at a decent price. I purchased it and decided to compare the three notebooks.

The Bullet Journal is the most expensive of the three, but also comes with the most “stuff”. There’s a booklet that explains how to bullet journal, stickers for bullet journaling, a specially formatted front endpaper, a key for bullet journaling, three ribbon bookmarks instead of two, and several pages with dedicated bullet journal appropriate titles (intentions, index, future log). It has the fewest colour options (just three) and features Bullet Journal branding on the front cover and the spine.

The Leuchtturm 120g notebook has a few more colour options, and is basically a stripped down Bullet Journal edition. In terms of thickness the two notebooks are the same (i.e. very thick notebooks, about twice the thickness of a Moleskine), but the 120g notebook has just two ribbon bookmarks (instead of three), no special endpapers, stickers (beyond the regular ones that come with each Leuchtturm notebook), titled pages, key or booklet. It’s cheaper than the Bullet Journal and has the same paper that the Bullet Journal has.

120gsm on the left, Bullet Journal on the right

Same thickness and form factor:

The regular Leuchttuem dot grid (which I’ll refer to as the standard from now on) is 20% thinner than the other two, features 80gsm paper and not 120gsm and like the 120g has two ribbon bookmarks, label stickers for the notebook, and a pocket on the back. It’s also a bit lighter than the two other notebooks.

Standard on the left, Bullet Journal on the right

Where the standard notebook wins in a knockout is page count. The standard has 251 pages, the 120gsm has 203 pages and the Bullet Journal has 205 pages, but several of those pages feature dedicated Bullet Journal titles (Index, Future Log, etc).

All three notebooks open flat, feature an off white paper, and the last 20 pages are perforated so you can tear them out. The standard and 120gsm contain two lined table of content pages, which the Bullet Journal does not. The Bullet Journal is also the only one to contain special divisions on the paper, which are notated on the front endpaper:

The front endpaper on the standard and the 120gsm look very similar, but the 120gsm has a bit of additional branding:

The stickers on the standard and 120gsm are the same, and are meant to be used on the cover and spine, to label the notebook:

The pockets on all three notebooks look and function pretty much the same.

Back endpapers and pocket in the Standard and 120gsm

The table of contents pages on the standard and 120gsm is useful if you use your notebook for project management or meeting notes, for instance, and want to be able to quickly reference a certain page. The pages are already numbered, so it’s just a matter of building the reference pages in a way that makes sense to you. This doesn’t exist in the Bullet Journal because Leuchtturm is assuming that you’ll be using the official Bullet Journal way of referencing and finding pages.

What Leuchtturm confusingly calls Bookmarks – two index pages in the Standard and 120gsm

Now for the paper. The dot grid is the same on all three, but the paper in the standard is by far the inferior of the three. The page is practically transparent (you can see the Leuchtturm1917 logo on the back pocket on the bottom of the page) and you will have show through with all kinds of inks, pens and nib sizes, and bleed through with most pens and inks (including wider gel ink pens!):

This is a notebook that you either need to use with a very specific kind of pen, or be willing to write on only one side of the page (therefore giving up on the price and page number advantage of the notebook):

Show through and bleed through on the Standard. Even the gel inks faired poorly.

Here’s a close up of the way the ink behaved. This is fountain pen friendly paper in terms of it not spreading or feathering, but the bleed through and show through will limit you to fine and extra fine nibs and less saturated inks:

No feathering, some spread with the Retro 51 refill

The 120gsm paper on both the Bullet Journal and the 120gsm notebook fair much better:

You can definitely use both sides of the page with this notebook, and feel free to toss every kind of nib width and ink at it — I haven’t found one that it can’t handle.

Back of the 120gsm (Bullet Journal was the same)

I’ve been using the Bullet Journal for a while now and I have had no problems using even broad and flexible nibs on it, with wet inks. Inks take time to dry on it, but they don’t bleed through.

Ink test page with example of wet and wide nibs on the Bullet Journal

The paper in all three journals is off white. That may bother you. Here’s the page with a sample of a white page next to it:

Paper colour sample – Leuchtturm vs white paper

At the bottom and the left side of the page you can see the special Bullet Journal divisions, meant to help you create various BuJo formats of things. They’re very unobtrusive, so you can easily ignore them if you don’t need them:

Bullet Journal markings on the bottom and on the left margin

So, basically:

Standard — cheapest one, thinnest and lightest with the most pages. Works only if you use fine gel ink pens or fine and extra-fine nibs with unsaturated or light coloured inks. If you write with a heavy hand, or prefer to use ballpoints this paper will likely note work for you, as you’ll carve your way through several pages without really intending to. If you’re willing and able to work around its limitations, it’s worth getting. It’s also more widely available and comes with a much larger range of cover colours than the other two.

120gsm – when in doubt, get this notebook. It’s got the best paper for the least amount of money of the three. If two ribbon bookmarks aren’t enough for you, it’s likely that you’ll need more than three anyway — get post it tabs. If you don’t have to have the Bullet Journal addons and formatting, save a few bucks and get this notebook. You’ll also have a few more cover colour options.

Bullet Journal — get this if you want to use the Bullet Journal method or you want to try it. If you end up deciding not to use the method, you’re still left with a great notebook, and you can buy the 120gsm next time.

I hope this helps clarify things a bit. Personally I’m currently using the Bullet Journal as a regular notebook (my quarterly planning, weekly planner and long term lists are in it) after failing to find value in the Bullet Journal system, and the standard notebook for work projects. The 120gsm will replace the Bullet Journal once I’ve filled it.

Leuchtturm1917 Drehgriffle Nr. 2 Mechanical Pencil Review

The Leuchtturm1917 Drehgriffel Nr.1 is a charming little pen that comes with either a gel refill or a ballpoint refill. The Drehgriffel Nr. 2 is its pencil counterpart: a short but hefty mechanical pencil with a twist mechanism that comes in a variety of colours. My pencil is a bright red and dark grey one, and it has quickly become my most used pencil by far.

The pencil is shorter than other mechanical pencils, but as it’s an aluminium bodied pencil with a steel tip it has some weight and heft to it. It’s lighter than the Rotring 800, and the weight is balanced towards the tip so it’s very comfortable to use.

Drehgriffel Nr. 2 on top, Rotring 800 on the bottom

The pencil mechanism is proprietary to Leuchtturm, and it’s a pretty unique affair. You give the nob on the top a quarter twist and then you hear a satisfying click and the lead advances. The pencil mechanism looks like a gel ink or ballpoint refill, but the little pole on the top pulls out and you can add more pencil leads to the pencil that way. You get to the mechanism through unscrewing the front cone tip of the pencil.

Here’s a closeup of the mechanism (my camera had issues focusing on the lettering):

Here you can see where the leads go in:

The Drehgriffel Nr. 2 is a 0.7 mechanical pencil and it comes with HB leads inside. It’s a great pencil with a classic, sleek design, and a very solid and unique mechanism. The size is plus as it makes it ideal for everyday carry, and it doesn’t have the silly little eraser that certain mechanical pencils have and is always terrible. The only minus to this design is that to add more leads to it you basically have to take the pencil apart. That’s no big chore, but the end bit (the little pole thing) is very small and would be easy to misplace. I’d suggest doing the refilling in batches of a few leads at a time, and being careful to not lose sight of the mechanism end bit.

Otherwise this is an excellent mechanical pencil, a solid and handsome little workhorse that’s a joy to use and would make for a great gift even for people who are not great pencil lovers.

Two thank you cards and Schmincke Aqua Bronze review

I’m coming on my two year anniversary from the end of my chemo (it’s at the end of next month, so basically on Christmas Eve), and I have a check up with my hemato-oncologist in two days. I sketched this to give her with a box of pralines, a small token of my gratitude for the past two and a half years:

It’s a new kind of paper so it came out a bit more blotchy than I’d like, which made me want to play with it a bit more. I wanted to make another quick card for one of my mom’s doctors, who’s retiring, so I had some pigment fun:

If you don’t like granulating watercolours then you’d hate this paper.

I then used Schmincke’s Aqua Bronze rich gold to add some writing to it. Aqua Bronze is basically a small jar full of glitter powder that you mix with a little bit of water (a very, very small bit of water) on your palette and it turns into metallic watercolour. Unlike other metallic watercolours Aqua Bronze has good coverage and opacity, and it really pops off the page. It’s the very last thing you add to your drawing, after everything else has completely (and I mean completely) dried up. You need very little of the powder and even less water, a cheap plastic palette and a cheap synthetic brush and you’re all set.

There are several different kinds of metallic hues, and they all work the same. Do remember that you want to use a cheap brush and a palette you don’t care about because this is glitter. You also don’t want to clean the brush in your regular water pot, or to use the same water for another drawing later on. Aqua Bronze sticks to everything, and you can’t ensure that it was completely cleaned out of your tools, so don’t use your best brush or your usual palette for this.

You mix up the powder with a tiny bit of water and a bit of patience (it takes less water and more time than you think) and then apply it to your dry drawing. The paint stays in place but if you brush your fingers on it, they will come out with a fine dusting of glitter. Here’s how it turned out:

If you want even more opacity, you’re going to have to use a paint marker. In this case I wanted the yellow in the abstract blue rose to be reflected in the thank you written in gold so I wanted the soft edges of the Aqua Bronze.

If you’re thinking about creating watercolour holiday cards and want to add a little bling to them, Aqua Bronze could be an option. I’d select one colour as the jars aren’t cheap, and I’d finish the sketches and then add the glitter highlights in one batch.

De Atramentis Document Ink Green Grey

De Atramentis Document Ink Green Grey is a waterproof fountain pen ink that could have easily been called “Sage Green”. It’s dry and offers a fair amount of shading, is quick drying and would be a good addition to any Urban Sketcher’s kit.

While I think that De Atramentis Document Ink Green Grey is much too light to be useful as a writing ink (see sample below) its subtlety, natural shade and waterproofness makes it very useful when coupled with watercolours.

Writing sample with two different pens on Midori MD cotton paper.

When used by itself, particularly in wider nibs, DA Geen Grey gives sketches a “vintage” feel and a good amount of interest: it both shades and allows for dry brushing effects because it’s so dry. Want a dry brush effect? Just work fast, and the tendency of this ink to skip will suddenly be an advantage:

This shade makes this sketch a bit melancholy, which is what I was looking for.

DA Green Grey truly shines as an under-drawing ink for watercolours. You can freely sketch guidelines and work directly in ink with it, and then add watercolour. It’s light enough to fade into the background, while still remaining permanent on the page and providing you with useful references.

Ink sketch with a Staedtler pigment liner

Can you even see DA Green Grey lines in this sketch? (you can, from very close by and if you know what you’re looking for)

If you work with watercolours, especially if you’re an urban sketcher, I highly recommend adding De Atramentis Document Ink Green Grey to your kit. It can replace a pencil for the under-sketches of your work, and it doesn’t change the shade of the watercolours, nor does it need to be erased. A pen with this is going to be added to my sketch kit, though I will probably use a fine or medium nibbed fountain pen for this ink and not go any finer because it’s so dry.

Schmincke Super Granulation Volcano Watercolour Trio Review

If you use watercolours you usually find yourself in one of two camps: those who want as much control of their painting as possible and so hate granulating watercolours, and those who love the magic of granulating pigments, and the unexpected effects they create. For the first few years that I was using watercolours I hated the “cauliflower” and “graininess” of granulating watercolours and so I actively avoided those pigments. Nowadays I have several granulating watercolours on my palette (and two super granulating ones) and I enjoy the watercolour magic and pigment parties that they create.

A few years ago Schmincke started issuing “super granulation” watercolours, which are watercolours with extra pronounced granulation effects and two different pigments in the same paint – something that created a dual colour effect and added tons of texture to any painting they were used in.

I reviewed the first of those paints here, and since then Schmincke have come out with three more series of super granulation paints: Shire, Desert and Volcano. Of the three the Volcano interested me the most as it seemed to fill in a gap that the very blue and green leaning previous sets were missing: warm, red hues. As Schmincke watercolours aren’t cheap, and the full volcano set came out to more than I was willing to pay for just to experiment with, I purchased a trio box of 5ml tubes to try out.

The trio I got contained 913 Volcano Red, 914 Volcano Violet and 915 Volcano Brown. The one that I was most interested in was the volcano red. The one that I ended liking the most is the one that I had the least expectation for: volcano brown.

I filled three half pans with paint and let them dry out for 24 hours (Schmincke watercolours are much easier to pan fill than Daniel Smith as they come out of the tube better and they dry quicker). I then did a colour swab for each, and a paint test with three paint consistencies (honey, milk, tea as Marc Taro Holmes calls them): the first with very little water, the second with more pigment than water and the third with very little pigment. In the case of the volcano brown I overdid the water in the tea swab, so it’s much lighter than the rest.

Volcano red is semi-transparent and semi-staining, volcano violet is semi-opaque and semi-staining, and volcano brown is semi-opaque and staining. The opacity-transparency spectrum in watercolours is important if you mix watercolours, as the more opaque a paint is the less well it mixes and the more chance you’ll get a “muddy” mixture out it. It is also important for layering, as opaque paints will not layer as well as transparent ones. For this reason I use opaque and semi-opaque paints sparingly, and usually only during the final stages of my painting.

Staining is a measure of how easy it is to “lift” the paint off the page with water or by dabbing it off, should you need to. The more staining the paint, the harder it is to lift without leaving a stain behind (this also depends on the paper you use, of course).

Looking at the paints, the volcano brown shows dual brown and red pigments, the volcano violet shows red and purple pigments, and the red shows red and maybe orange pigments, but it’s hard to tell. The volcano brown is the most dramatic and interesting of the three, though the volcano red is by far the most granulating of them.

I tried to create a sketch using only these paints (on 100% cotton watercolour paper) and boy do they show their super granulating properties. while the volcano red by itself isn’t impressive, it does layer spectacularly well on the other two paints, and the volcano brown adds a lot of interest and drama to the painting. Of the three I’m likely to add the volcano brown into the rotation, and perhaps, for certain effects, the volcano red. The violet would come in handy if I was working on portraits maybe, but otherwise it reminds me of potter pink: a pigment that is too washed out to be of any regular use in my palette, and not worth the space when it comes to keeping it around for mixing purposes.

If you’re just building your watercolour palette, these paints are not for you. However, if you have an established palette and a certain style of painting that favours texture and layering, I’d recommend giving at least some of the Schmincke super granulation watercolours a try. They are bound to result in something interesting and unexpected.

Lamy ColorPlus Coloured Pencils Review

I rarely write reviews that trash products— because I tend not to waste my time and money on products that could potentially be bad. However, I was stuck in Tampa’s airport on a very long connection due to inclement weather and so I browsed their bookstore and found this:

Well it says Lamy on the box, so it can’t be bad, right? And it was just $15 for 36 pencils…

This is where the red flags should have popped up, but they didn’t. I bought the pencils.

When I got home and opened the box, my heart sank. The leads were broken on almost all of the pencils. Now the box was in my trolley, well protected from dropping or crushing, so there was really no reason for this amount of damage. I checked the back of the box:

“Highly resistant to breakage” it is not.

The pencils are triangular shaped, which is supposed to make them ergonomic. It makes them more unpleasant to sharpen, as there’s a steep “bump” whenever you turn the pencil to another side.

The colour selection is weird — there are a lot of various shades of brown, but no ochre. The browns themselves are nothing like the colours that you’d expect from their labelling. I use the term “labelling” loosely here, because there’s no colour labelling on the pencils, just a dip of colour that is vaguely similar to the actual pencil colour produced.

The 36 shades chosen are wild – way to many similar brown, not enough greens, too many purples and blues, and of course utterly useless white and the bewildering gold and silver which are neither gold nor silver. Obviously the pencils crumbled while creating these samples so there are some duplicates here.

The pencils are very waxy, which means after 2-3 layers maximum the paper will be clogged and subsequent layers won’t be registered. The pencils also crumble easily —- even with very light pressure applied. Creating this sketch with them was nightmarish, as the leads kept crumbling, and I couldn’t get the shades that I wanted to the layering that I was trying to achieve.

I honestly don’t understand why this product exists. It’s too expensive and not robust enough for children’s use, it’s definitely not artist grade (poor pigment, layering and no labelling), and even student grade pencils are properly labelled these days. In any case, save your money to buy better pencils. You deserve them.

Writing at Large

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