Vengeful Fortress Part 2: More Thoughts on Stillman and Birn Epsilon

You can find part 1 here. You can see that there is a slight bit of show through with the Stillman and Birn Epsilon, but at only 150 gsm that’s to be expected.

The show through is most pronounced in the area between the goblin’s sword and the text above him.

I decided to play a bit more with ink colours and wider nibs here, so that’s a Sailor medium stub nib and Diamine Inkvent Blue Edition Candy Cane ink for spells and effects:

There’s no show through for the ink, and though it may not seem that way, there was no spreading. Also, if you like granulating watercolour effects, the Stillman and Birn Epsilon paper seems to be a champ for that.

Vengeful Fortress: A Stillman and Birn Epsilon Sketchbook Review Adventure Part 1

A while ago a local art supply shop started stocking a wider variety of Stillman and Birn sketchbooks. I currently use the Stillman and Birn pocket Alpha as my daily sketchbook, but I decided to give the pocket Epsilon a try. The Epsilon features smooth, white 150 gsm pages which should work for pen, ink, dry media and light washes.

This sketchbook is in landscape format, which is what I normally prefer. I was planning to use it once I’ve finished with my current Alpha, but weeks stretched to months and meanwhile this sketchbook has been languishing away, unused.

So when I saw Liz Steel going on a virtual sketch tour in Italy, I was inspired to grab this notebook and fill it with a sketch tour of my own. I initially planned to sketch out my cancelled London trip, and I may yet do that, but something inspired me to take this idea to a completely new direction.

I’m going to sketch out a freeform fantasy roleplaying adventure for my regular D&D group, and use that as a way to test out this sketchbook, and to make good use of my fountain pens.

So without further ado: Vengeful Forest, a fantasy freeform adventure.

Sketch and writing done with TWSBI 540 Diamond F nib and Rohrer and Klingner Lotte SketchINK.

Blue lines done with PenBBS 500 Fine and Sailor Sky High ink.

Frying pan Rapunzel dressed in purple is probably copyrighted by Disney, but one of my players thought it would be funny to make my life interesting, so here she is.

I tried to give each character a distinct enough colour scheme so you’ll be able to recognize them from a distance. Each player had one sentence to describe their character.

The watercolours are Schminke and I used a Windsor and Newton Series 7 number 2 brush and a Rosemary and Co 772 brush

I’ll continue posting as the adventure progresses, but so far this has been a lot of fun, and the players seem to be enjoying it too. The Stillman and Birn Epsilon has been an absolute champ: it takes light washes beautifully, with very little buckling, allowing me to use both sides of each page. It also works well with fountain pens, especially fine nibbed ones, which are commonly used for sketching. The white paper makes everything pop, and even though 150 gsm isn’t much when it comes to watercolour, it did allow for some layering and reworking without turning into a messy paper pulp. This is a sketchbook that I’m definitely going to purchase again.

Rotring 600 Levenger Fountain Pen and Rollerball Review

I haven’t bought a fountain pen on eBay in years, but when I decided to celebrate completing a six month intensive DevOps course, I headed out to eBay in search for the Rotring 600 Levenger rollerball. Yes, you read that correctly, I was looking for the Rotring 600 rollerball, not the fountain pen. I love the design of the Rotring 600 Levenger pens, but I thought that there was zero chance that I’ll manage to snag a good quality fountain pen, not to mention a fountain pen and rollerball set, so I decided to focus on the cheaper to obtain rollerball. As it turned out, I landed on an estate sale Rotring 600 set, and managed to get a Rotring 600 Levenger fountain pen and rollerball in great condition for a pretty good price.

The Rotring 600 Levenger pens aren’t flashy. They both have metal hexagon bodies with knurled ends and the classic Rotring red rings on the cap ends. The cap ends and the grip and the pen finial and round, and the pen body and cap are hexagonal, and somehow the transition between these two shapes is perfect and seamless. Industrial design at its best.

The fountain pen cap snaps into place with the help of the two silver protrusions on the knurled grip section. These protrusions don’t get in the way while writing, no matter how weird your pen grip is, and the section itself is very comfortable to hold. The knurling isn’t as dense as on the Rotring 600 mechanical pencil, and it is smoothed over so it doesn’t dig into your fingers. It provides a secure grip, while giving the pen the traditional Rotring look.

Because of the silver protrusions the pen cap snaps very securely into place. The fountain pen came with no converter, just unbranded short international cartridges, but it was easy enough to take the converter off my Super5 pen and use it here. The nib grade is indicated on the pen cap, which is what you’d expect on a drafting pencil. I like that oh so Rotring touch.

The Rotring 600 fountain pen comes with a steel nib that’s shaped a lot like a Lamy Safari nib. It’s stamped with Rotring’s logo on one side, and the nib grade on the other.

The nib is smooth and a lot of fun to write with, but it’s on the wider (European) side of fine. A 0.7 mm width line. Check out that grip section design:

The rollerball has a blue indicator, presumably for the colour of the ink refill inside. By the time I got it the refill had dried out, and so I replaced it with my favourite refill, the Uni-ball UMR-85N gel ink refill. This is the reason I bought the set and I couldn’t be happier with my purchase. Just look at it:

That’s so sleek and so clever, and I have no idea why they stopped producing them. Side by side you can see that the knurling on the fountain pen is slightly more pronounced. You can hardly feel the difference when in use, but I thought that it’s worth pointing out.

And here is that glorious nib in use, with a quick sketch of the Albert Memorial in London. The ink is Sailor Jentle Ink Epinard, which is a fun ink to sketch with an a green ink dark enough that you can sneak it into office use (not that anyone would notice or care right now).

It’s been a tough time, and a long and challenging six months course, but I couldn’t be happier with my “reward” for finishing it. If you run across a Rotring 600 rollerball or fountain pen at a reasonable price, by all means, buy them. The design on these pens is the kind that belongs in museums it’s so good, and they are a lot of fun to use too.

Rotring, if you’re listening, bring these back!

Retro 51 Blue Acrylic Tornado

The Retro 51 Blue Acrylic is the last Retro 51 that I have yet to review as part of my Retro 51 challenge (minus the Retro 51 Flower and Retro 51 Coffee which are quarantined in my office). I bought this pen years ago in the Latin Quarter in Paris, in a little store on Boulevard Saint-Michel. The store had a few Retro 51 tornados in their dusty window display, and after some hemming and hawing I went in and asked about the pens. The proprietor had no idea what I wanted to buy from, but after some pointing he brought out his Retro 51 tray. The moment I saw this pen, I knew that I had to have it:

The Retro 51 Blue Acrylic features chatoyant acrylic swirls in blue and navy, and it’s somewhat transparent, which means that you can see glints of the metal refill tube below the material. Like the Pelikan M800 Ocean Swirl there’s a dark side to the material, and a light side.

The hardware is chrome, and so very bright. This works well with the overall colour scheme. The acrylic body does pick up lint in a way that Retro 51’s metal-bodied pens do not. I’m not sure this would make for a good pocket carry pen because of that.

Weight wise it doesn’t feel significantly lighter than Retro 51’s metal-bodied pens. If that’s you’re draw to this pen, then you’ll be disappointed. But how can you be disappointed in a pen that looks like this?

The finial features a dark navy blue, almost black, disc. I kind of wish that Retro 51 had made the finial out of the swirly acrylic material, but I guess that would have hiked up the price significantly.

I changed out the refill for my favourite Ohto FlashDry refill, mostly because the old refill dried out. I used to use the semi-dried out old Schmidt refill for sketching, as it was pretty perfect for that.

The above drawing was drawn with the Retro 51 Blue Acrylic and the Ohto FlashDry 0.5 gel ink refill, plus some Faber-Castell PITT brush pens. My parents’ cats have ideas about my dad’s laptop that don’t coincide with his.

If you stumble upon one of these Retro 51 Acrylic Tornado pens, snap them up. They’re gorgeous, and life is too short to carry an ugly pen.

Retro 51 Pen Addict

The quarantine distracted me from reviewing the two final Retro 51 pens that I have on hand (the Coffee and Flower edition are regrettable locked away at work), and the first of these two is the original Retro 51 Pen Addict limited edition tornado.

The Pen Addict Retro 51 was the first pen that Brad Dowdy had made for his shop, and it embodies both the Pen Addict aesthetic and the Retro 51 motto: “Life is too short to carry an ugly pen”.

The ding near the tip is my fault. There’s no chip off the pen and you hardly notice it, but it’s still there.

This is not an ugly pen. Orange isn’t my favourite colour, but it totally works on this pen, both because of the specific metallic orange hue used here, and because of the dark hardware. The Pen Addict Retro 51 just glows:

It also is a numbered edition (I have number 77) and has one of the best Retro 51 top discs/finials: the Pen Addict logo.

This is one of the few Retro 51s that I own that still have the Schmidt refill installed. I’m not a fan of this refill, but there are times when I’m looking for big, bold lines and it just fits the spot. This is the first time I used it for drawing:

The Retro 51 Pen Addict original limited edition is still a great, classic Retro 51 tornado design. It’s no longer offered for sale on the Pen Addict shop, but if you find it reasonably priced on the secondary market, it’s totally worth buying.

Creative Draw: Koh-I-Noor Magic pencil, TWSBI JR Pagoda 0.7 and Pilot Juice Up 0.4

Things have been tough lately and I haven’t been in the mood to draw anything, write anything, post anything. So I decided to make myself create something, as silly and small as it could turn out to be, just to see if I can draw myself out of the funk.

I dug into my largest art and stationery supply drawer, and picked out three random items: a Koh-I-Noor Magic pencil, a TWSBI Jr Pagoda 0.7 mechanical pencil, and a Pilot Juice Up 0.4 in blue ink. Nothing good could come out of this random draw, I thought to myself, but I’ll draw something anyway:

The Koh-I-Noor Magic pencil comes in many varieties, some of the actually pragmatic. This Magic pencil is just ridiculous. It’s a giant, glittery, neon mess that makes me smile.

The TWSBI Jr Pagoda is a solid mechanical pencil, but in the battle against the Uni-ball Kuru Toga or any kind of drafting pencil it is always going to lose. I enjoyed using this underdog, and I think that design-wise it’s a very good mechanical pencil.

The Pilot Juice Up is excellent, and Pilot should replace all of its Hi-Tec-C pens with this refill (and perhaps even with this design). The refill gives Uni-ball gel refills a run for their money, and the barrel design is both sleek and ergonomic. This is a phenomenal pen that I really need to use more.

This turned out to be a fun exercise in creativity, and it made me smile for a bit. Will I do it again? Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

PenBBS 456 Smog RM and Pilot Iroshizuku Fuyu-Syogun

I ordered the PenBBS 456 Vacuum Filling Smog 54 RM at the same time I ordered the PenBBS 500, because I was intrigued by the filling system, and I wanted a PenBBS 500 with the Smog design but there weren’t any available. I was expecting to like the PenBBS 500 more because from the pictures it seems to have a more classic design, but the PenBBS 456 is the perfect example of how pen pictures often misleading.

The 456 is a much sleeker pen than its chubby 500 counterpart. There’s also significantly less hardware on the 456, which makes it both lighter and better looking. Massive chrome details on fountain pens just seem to cheaper their look in my eyes. If the cap band had been about half the size then the 456’s design would be better, but as it is it’s not a pen that I’d be ashamed to carry, and it looks more expensive than it actually is.

The steel nib on this is a medium, and it writes at about a 0.7mm line, as described. The nib design itself is elegant and clever, with a calligraphy “M” designating its width. The nib itself is smooth with some feedback, and has little or no give.

I purposefully filled this pen only about a third of the way up once I realized what a massive ink capacity it has. The filling mechanism is somewhat elaborate, like all vacuum fillers, but it works, and unlike the end-cap on the PenBBS 500, the PenBBS 456’s end-cap doesn’t twist off unintentionally.

The smog material is really beautiful, and it’s a way to get some of that Visconti vacuum-filler, London Fog feel without breaking the bank. This pen proves that you don’t have to pay hundreds and hundreds of dollars to have a nice pen that you enjoy writing with.

Some more closeups on the overly large cap band (if only it had ended on the line below the “Shanghai”) and the lovely smog material. You can also see the filling mechanism clearly:

The material looks even better when the pen is filled up with ink, but I just wasn’t willing to dump out so much ink, and I knew that I would be forced to do that if I topped the pen up:

Pilot Iroshizuku Fuyu Syogun was one of the first Pilot Iroshizuku inks that I splurged on. It shades beautifully, and is a lovely cool (i.e. bluish) grey that is utterly not waterproof, and so can be “stretched” and reworked as you can see in the small sketch that I did:

This was drawn on Tomoe River paper, but you’ll see shading on Rhodia and Clairefontaine paper as well. Of all the grey inks I own, this one is still my favourite. It’s dark enough to be readable (and appropriate for office use), and offers a lot of interest and drawing potential with its shading.

Like all pens that aren’t cartridge converters, cleaning this pen out will take a bit of effort, and vacuum filling pens are more difficult to clean out than piston fillers or lever fillers (only button fillers are worse IMHO). It just means that you’ll need to have patience when filling and cleaning this pen out, and that you probably shouldn’t put shimmering inks or inks that are difficult to clean out (or stain the pen body) in a pen like this. Then again, the pen costs $32, so if worst comes to worst, you haven’t ruined an expensive pen.

I wish that PenBBS would pick a naming convention that is easier to remember than the one it is currently using. But other than that and the not great cap band, for double the price the PenBBS would still be a great buy.

Diamine Inkvent Blue Edition

Diamine came out with the very successful Inkvent advent calendar last year, and now they are bringing out all of the inks in the calendar in a special “Blue Edition” box and bottle. Cult Pens had them first in stock, and had a nice 10% discount on them, so I decided to splurge on some ink bottles (after not buying any for years).

The Inkvent Blue Edition boxes evoke the beautiful design of the Inkvent calendar, which makes them great gift inks to give. Everything about the boxes, the labels and the bottles is of the highest quality, and is well thought out. These are pretty enough to keep on your desk, whether they are in their blue box or not.

The bottles themselves, of course, are the main design event. They are glass bottles with thick legs, and an ingenious design. They look gorgeous, but they’re also very practical. The cap is large enough to allow the widest nibs in, and the actual part of the bottle that holds the ink is built so that there won’t be any awkward corners that your pen can’t get into. The bottles are tall enough to allow for larger pens to be filled with ease.

Did I mention that they look stunning?

You can see the design of the legs and the ink reservoir here:

The bottles of shimmer ink (and shimmer and sheen ink) come with this handy little insert:

The bottles of sheen ink come with this insert:

This is more proof of the amount of thought that went into designing this edition. I don’t know if Diamine planned on issuing the Blue Edition ahead of time or only once it saw the success of its Inkvent calendar, but either way, this isn’t some hastily dashed out ink edition.

When it came to selecting the inks that I wanted to buy, I ended up surprising myself with my selection. I expected to buy the Solstice, but I ended up buying theBlue Peppermint instead. I love turquoise inks, and I don’t yet have one that shades and shimmers. I never thought that I’d buy Candy Cane, but not only did I buy it (I wanted something to brighten up my life a bit right now), but it’s the first ink that I used in the set.

Holly was also not an obvious choice, but it’s an interesting ink and I don’t have many green inks on hand. Seasons Greetings was wild enough and unique enough for me to add it first to my cart. Nutcracker is here because I think that it will be a great (albeit not waterproof) drawing ink.

If money and space weren’t an issue, I’d probably add Solstice, Snow Storm, and Polar Glow to my shopping cart. Maybe I will, in the future. For now I’m tremendously happy with the Diamine Blue Edition inks that I bought, and if you’re looking for a small pick me up or an inexpensive gift for the pen addict in your life, I highly recommend these.

PenBBS 500 Summer and Sailor Sky High

After a long wait my PenBBS 500 Summer finally arrived earlier last month. The PenBBS 500 is a piston filler with a new and rather elaborate filling mechanism for the shockingly low price of $29.99. At that price it can’t be very good, right?

This pen is about the size and thickness of a Pelikan M800, but it’s much heavier than the M800.

While the PenBBS 500 is far from a perfect pen, it is much better than the price tag would have you believe. It’s a heavy pen, made with beautiful acrylic that is both partly translucent and chatoyant, with swirls in pearlescent white, turquoise and royal blue.

There is a lot of branding on this pen, which accounts for some of the choices to slap a lot of chrome on it. You can see the piston spring through the pen body. The “summer” acrylic is beautiful.

The hardware isn’t to my tasting, as there’s too much of it, and it ends up cheapening the pen’s look. The finial has a nice art deco look to it, but when it comes to its functional design it could use some improvement. To fill the pen you twist the small circle in the centre of the finial until it pops out and you can access the spring/piston mechanism to fill the pen. It’s not very convenient to twist open on the one hand, and on the other hand if you’re not careful you can accidentally twist it open while carrying it.

The pen body is stepped down towards the end, maybe so you can cap it? But who caps fountain pens, and why on earth would you want to do that with such a heavy cap?

I like the clip design, but the cap band and the top of the cap hardware are much too pronounce for my taste, and they add a weight to the pen. The pen itself is top heavy, but not the point where it’s uncomfortable or awkward to write with.

I’m not a fan of that big glob of chrome at the end.

As the ink colour partially shows through this pen, I decided to use Sailor Sky High in it. I’ve had a bottle laying around since the days when Sailor discontinued it and I rushed out to buy some. That was a silly move, but in those days I didn’t know any better. There’s always going to be another ink, people. No point in chasing the discontinued ones only to have the reissued in a few years, or to discover that another brand as the same hue for a fraction of the price.

Sailor’s inks are fun to draw with, particularly with a water brush, as they are utterly non-waterproof, and yet remain true to colour when wet. As I’m staying at home I drew my “nasturtiums,” which I just learned were called Tropaeolums and come from South America originally. They are very easy to grow from seed and offer a lot of interest even when not in flower.

This PenBBS 500 Summer has a fine nib, which skews slightly wider than Japanese fine nibs, and closer to European ones. Sailor Sky High shades enough for it to show with this nib size, and on Tomoe River paper the shading is more pronounced and a red sheen appears.

On Tomoe River paper wherever the ink pools, there’s a red sheen, but if you write fast enough, you won’t see it, and the ink will skew lighter:

The red sheen slightly appears on Rhodia and Canson paper, but not as much as on Tomoe River paper.

So, would I recommend the PenBBS 500 as a first piston filler for a newcomer to fountain pens? Probably not. It’s too finicky for that. But at such a low price and with such a good, workhorse nib this is the perfect pen for artists and users that want to experiment with various finicky or troublesome inks. Like the TWSBI GO, this is a pen that’s fun to use and your heart won’t break if you accidentally ruin it.

Moleskine Limited Edition Sakura

In early 2019 I found out that Moleskine had come out with a Sakura Limited Edition that they were selling originally only in Japan. This is not the dark pink/light pink limited edition Sakura that is available as part of their 2020 spring catalog, but a smaller run of notebooks that came out before that. The edition garnered enough interest that it started appearing outside of Japan in Moleskine stores near the end of 2019. After searching for this notebook online with no success, I was surprised to find it in a Moleskine store on Oxford street, London. I try not to buy notebooks abroad, because they can very quickly weigh down your luggage, but I couldn’t pass these by. There were two versions of Limited Edition Sakura in large format, and two pocket ones. I showed some restraint and “only” bought the large ones.

I just finished one journalling notebook and I was casting for the next one to use, when I decided to go for this Sakura one. It was difficult to acquire and expensive, so there was a risk that it would stay in its wrapper forever, but I decided that if anything would cheer me up as I journal through these difficult times it’s this notebook.

Front cover with wrapper. Notice how the wrapper design matches the fabric print.

The Moleskine Sakura is a cloth covered notebook, with an utterly unique design. There’s an imprint of cherry blossoms over the slightly shimmering pink fabric, and the imprint looks like it’s floating over the fabric cover. The result is a stunning and tactile notebook that looks extremely luxurious. It’s almost too pretty to use.

The fabric is clearly synthetic, and it has some shimmer to it because of that. The imprint on top has part of the fabric’s texture, and I’d venture to say that it was screen printed, but I’m not a screen printing expert so I could very well be wrong. It’s hard to capture how the covers look in person, but it’s as if there’s an invisible layer between the floral print and the fabric cover. The flowers appear to be floating in the air.

The print. Nobody does fabric covered notebooks as well as Moleskine does.

Inside the covers the endpapers feature the same print but in monochrome pink and white.

Here are the back endpapers, and Moleskine again gets full points for prints matching perfectly on the back pocket and the back cover.

The back pocket edges are in purple fabric, much like the elastic closure and the bookmark.

The bookmark features a slightly lighter purple than the elastic closure and back pocket.

Like most limited edition Moleskines the Sakura comes with a sticker sheet. This one is of cherry blossoms in white and various shades of pink. It’s a beautiful sheet of stickers, and the washi-like design of the bottom half of the sheet is a very nice touch.

Like all the Moleskines in recent years the paper wrapper features a “side-B” that you can reuse. This one is meant to be a bookmark, and design on it was so fetching, I actually cut it out and faced it with card-stock to make a bookmark that I’m now using.

My completed bookmark:

The Moleskine Sakura is one of the most stunning designs Moleskine has produced in recent years. I’m glad that they’re making a version of this design more widely available, and I really hope to see them utilizing this printing technique for other designs in the future.

Writing at Large

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