A blog about writing, sketching, running and other things
Drew this for a colleague about to go on maternity leave. It’s a small watercolour of her parents’ dog:
Drew this using Uni Posca paint markers. It’s a Loth Cat from Star Wars:
Both will be gifts. Which do you prefer?
I had a tough week, hence the delay in some posts. I did go to the weekly central protest tonight, despite the terrorist attack earlier this evening in Tel Aviv.
Sketched this very quickly in the dark. Them took a photo of it in the dark, and decided that it captures the moment well.
Have a great week, and if you live in a democracy, don’t take it for granted.
I went “shopping” in my stationery and art supply stash again, and this time used a Hahnemule Cappuccino sketchbook, a uni-ball sign pen, a Faber Castell PITT artist brush pen in light green (171), a Tombow ABT water based dual brush pen (I only used the brush side not the felt tip pen side) in light grey (cool grey 3 – N75), and a Caran d’Ache + Alfredo Haberli Fixpencil with a blue 2mm lead.
I used them all to draw the protest scene from this Saturday, using a photo I took during the protests. It was intensely hot and humid, and I went to the protests right after running a Dungeon World game at a small local tabletop roleplaying convention. With no art supplies on me, the best I could do was try and capture the scene to sketch later. When I was pulling things out to try out with this sketch, I decided to veer away from my comfort zone: I used tinted paper, a sign pen, mixed media, and an unusual colour. I like the result – for a quick sketch it captures the energy of the moment well.
I like the Hahnemule Cappuccino sketchbook. The paper is smooth but has a touch of grain to it that makes it work for pencils as well. It’s way too thin for wet media, but works great for brush pens, pencils, markers, etc.
My main sketching tool was the Uni Sign Pen. This is the first time I’ve used a sign pen for “serious” sketching, as I normally only use them for illustrations that I gift to friends’ kids. I like it – it has relatively little line variation, but on the other hand offers more control, and a good bold line. If you are dipping your toes into brush pens for sketching for the first time, this might be a good place to start to get a feel for the kind of thick lines these kinds of pens create.
The Faber-Castell PITT brush pen is a classic, one that I’ve used many times before in sketches. I’d love to say that they don’t disappoint, but like most soft and medium soft brush pens, the tip doesn’t last for long. They do come in lots of great colours and if you cap them they last much more than many other markers and brush pens in the market. They’re also waterproof, which is a bonus if you’re mixing them with wet media.
The Tombow dual brush pen is completely new to me, and I liked it enough to want to add it to my current sketching setup. It works well for quick shading (and shading and colour make sketches pop).
The Caran d’Ache + Alfredo Haberli Fixpencil… This is something that I want to properly review sometime in the future, so it’s been waiting on my desk for a while. For now I’ll just say that it did the job, although I have other pens and pencils that would have done the job better.
I also sketched our friend Joe during our weekly Zoom meeting, also on the Hahnemule Cappuccino and using the Uni Sign Pen. This was a very quick sketch, done it 2-3 minutes, and the sign pen does well with expressive lines.
Now go rummage in your stationery/art supply stash and find something new to play with. It’s guaranteed to make you smile.
Never have I ever fallen in love with a standard pen faster than the Zebra G-450. Even the Uni-ball Signo RT 0.5 took a bit of time until it became my favourite, and I had much less experience with gel ink pens at the time. I liked the Zebra G-450 so much that after writing a few pages with it, I put in an order for two more packs, just so I’ll have backups and multiples of it.
So, what’s so special about this pen?
First of all, the Zebra G-450 looks like it was designed to be a prop in the Jason Bourne movies. It doesn’t have the “I’M A TACTICAL PEN, LOOK AT ALL THE WEAPON LIKE APPLICATIONS YOU CAN GET WITH ME” look of tactical pens. I find that look childish, and I find that it makes for very uncomfortable to write with pens. The G-450 is nothing like that: it’s sleek, features a durable and hefty-without-being-heavy brass body, knurling on the top, a very well designed rubber grip, and very Jason Bourne like fonts.
The G-450 has a well designed and solid clip, with a step down/cutout right in front of it that adds interest to the pen silhouette and makes it easier to clip onto things.
I love the console like fonts in white, and I really love the grip. It isn’t mushy like a silicon grip, but it is softer than the pen body, and with the raised pattern on it, gives you a rock solid grip on the pen. The ring on top of the grip announces that this is gel pen, with a medium (0.7) tip. The pen cone has an extra small taper towards the tip, adding interest and perhaps also helping stabilize the refill. There’s no clicking, jiggling or noise from the tip as you write with the G-450.
The click mechanism is solid. The clicker (is it called that? let’s assume it is) stays extended at all times, even when the tip is engaged, and it has a very satisfying click. There’s a red jewel with Japanese writing in silver on the end cap, and it adds a nice and subtle splash of colour to the pen.
All this is wonderful, but it’s the refill that makes it all sing. It’s dark, super smooth, and it dries almost instantly. Yes, even on Stalogy paper, even on Rhodia and other fountain pen friendly paper, it just dries as soon as you write with it. This is a perfect lefty pen (I’m not a lefty) and it’s perfect for jotting things down in a rush. It will write a bold, clear line, and not smudge.
I sketched a local cafe with the Zebra G-450, on Stillman and Birn Alpha paper. I then “opened” up the lines using a waterbrush, as the the Zebra G-450’s fast drying refill isn’t waterproof (as is to be expected with gel ink pens). The result was a nice greyish purple that you can see on the coffee machine on the right. The coloured graphite was provided by the Derwent Inktense paint set, but that’s a review for a different day. Suffice to say that while the Zebra G-450 isn’t a sketching pen, it will work well as one in a pinch, as long as you like thick lines, and don’t mind it not being waterproof.
Rarely have I encountered a pen that I wholly like after just a day of use. I love the G-450’s aesthetic, its refill and its feel in the hand enough to immediately add it to my daily carry. I used Zebra’s wonderful G-301 pen daily for years, and I can see the G-450 easily replace it on merits of the refill alone. Sometimes a pen just ticks all the boxes for you, and this one clearly does for me. I recommend giving it a try if you possibly can. Who knows, maybe it will become a new favourite for you as well.
The intro post to this series is here, journaling for mental clarity is here, journaling through fear is here.
There are many journaling methods and planning methods that tell you to “empty your mind onto a page,” or “perform a mind dump”. This is usually a first step on the way to some other goal: planning your week, dealing with anxiety or finding a direction in life, etc. From GTD to Morning Pages everyone expects you to press a hidden button and just directly dump everything on your mind onto your journal.
The idea is that by emptying your mind onto a page you will be able to free more “processing power” to more high level thinking and planning. Your mind will be free of noise, will be relieved of the need to track and remember things, and will be able to do what you really need it to do: make decisions, plan ahead, come up with new ideas, allow you to be creative.
This is great in theory, but in practice I find myself sitting at a desk with an empty page and and a pen, my mind buzzing with stuff, and the general instruction “just write everything down!”
Where to start? How do you pull out the first thread from all that tangled jumble? How do you focus on mind dumping and not reflexively go into the censoring, editing, sorting process?
Pick one of these prompts to start with. I’ll explain later why they work:
First of all, it works for me, it may not work for you — our brains are like that. From my experience the mind tends to follow the initial thread you gave it, so at least for a while you don’t have to stare at a blank page wondering what to write down. The first prompts are very easily answered for that exact reason. None of these prompts are inherently emotionally charged, so you can start writing without first dealing with your emotional state (you can ease into that later, or not). The third prompts are funny and weird (you can pick others like them for yourself), because when things get really bad it’s useful to have them as a distraction. Trust me on that one.
If you’re working on planning ahead, then the second question in each prompt category can help you get started, but in many cases that’s not the point of the mind dumping exercise. If that’s the case, keep a notepad or a piece of paper on the side and once something that looks like a task comes into your head, write that down there and not in your journal/morning pages. You can process it once you’re done writing.
Here’s something that’s also not always discussed: you need to go into these kinds of exercises with a hard stop in mind. Set a page limit, a time limit, or better — set both and stop whichever limit you reach first. Your mind is constantly filling up with stuff, and if you don’t put a hard stop you could chase it forever, or tire yourself out with the first session or two and then never come back.
Mind dumping is a useful process that is best done often (daily or weekly). It’s hard to get into the habit if you find it hard to start, if you turn it into a task hunting chore, if you expect the process to be anything other than letting the junk in your brain get onto a page so that you can clear your head. Hopefully the prompts and tips here will help you get into the practice if you want to. If not, you could always just use them as regular journaling prompts. After all, who doesn’t want to see their favourite film remade into an opera?
Over the past 24 hours things have gotten very depressing and very scary here. To distract myself a little bit, I decided to start working on a new project: Going Shopping in My Stationery/Art Supply Stash. I have a lot of stuff. I don’t use enough of the stuff that I have, to the point where I don’t even remember what I have. As I’ve significantly cut down on buying new stationery and art supplies, I’ve decided this would be a good time to go “shopping” for new things to use in whatever it is that I already have.
I bought this fancy looking A5 composition notebook from Choosing Keeping in London this April, after eyeing their gorgeous notebooks the last time that I was there.
The endpaper is also very good looking:
The paper is cream and unruled, and the edges of the paper are mottled brown. It is one of the best looking notebooks that I have:
I was planning on using it as a journal, but the paper was an utter disappointment. It is not fountain pen friendly, which really surprised me — the ink spreads and feathers and bleeds through. I could have used a gel ink pen with this notebook, but it somehow seemed incongruous with how fancy and special (and expensive) the notebook is.
So I shelved it and I haven’t touched it in months, until today. My eye caught it as I was looking for a notebook to sketch in, and I remembered that the paper had some tooth and texture to it.
It’s a soft, velvety kind of paper, which made me thing that it might work with pencil quite well. I also had some pencils I wanted to try out, so it seemed like a good opportunity to not let a fancy notebook go to waste.
Enter the pencil that I wanted to try out most: the Eberhard Faber EFA 1000 vintage pencil in 2=B grade. I know, it’s weird. I don’t get it either. 2 is supposed to be HB.
I bought a box of these beauties at during my last visit at Present and Correct, and I’ve been wanting to use them since. They’re made in Germany, the lead is a B grade (slightly softer and darker than HB), very smooth and it retains its point surprisingly long for a soft pencil.
The pencil comes pre-sharpened, and has an orange and black body that looks a bit like the Staedtler Noris, but in orange instead of yellow. It has “Germany”, “EFA”, “Eberhard Faber”, “EFA 1000” and “2=B” embossed on it silver foil. The fonts used look very futuristic and modern, which makes me think that this is a ‘70’s pencil.
The biggest issue with vintage pencils is the eraser, which is always dried up and completely unusable. For this reason I prefer vintage pencils that don’t have erasers, or better yet, those that have endcaps. Well the EFA 1000 gets lots of bonus points for not only having an endcap, but having a really good looking one. It’s also silver in colour, and it features three rings and a concave top.
I then sat down to create this quick sketch of the latest round of pro-democracy protests. The pencil was a joy to use, and it worked very well on the paper. I was very happy with the feel of them both, and with the sketch results:
I added some colour with three Tombow Irojiten coloured pencils and a Koh-I-Noor brown Magic Pencil. The Tombow Itojiten was an utter disppointment. The green pencil crumbled twice, the others were mediocre at best. The Koh-I-Noor was a lot of fun, but brown works best with other coloured pencils layered on top, to give it some life.
All in all this first attempt at shopping from my own stationery stash was a success. The EFA 1000 is staying on my desk, I learned things about the Tombow Irojiten (I’m glad I only have three Itojiten pencils and not a box of them), and I got to use a notebook that I’d thought would just gather dust. This is definitely something I will try to do again.
This is the second post in this series. You can find the intro here, and the first post here.
The title of this blog is somewhat ambiguous, and that’s on purpose. Like the famous “litany against fear” that appears in “Dune”, fear is something that you cannot avoid, the best you can do with it is let it wash over you, observe the lessons that it has to teach you, and be left standing stronger and wiser in the end.
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain”.
Frank Herbert, Dune
I’m a cancer survivor, still living through the high risk of recurrence years of my remission. All my close family members have serious, life-threatening medical conditions. I live in a country where rockets are shot at me and my loved ones at regular intervals, where there’s always the threat of terrorism or just regular, run-of-the-mill violence. My government is methodically stripping me, my family and friends of rights and legal protections even as I write this. I spend my weekends (and lately my weekdays) going to protests where both police and counter-protesters have been regularly violent towards us. Being a human being these days is a fear-inducing thing, and I personally am living through a very fear-inducing life.
So it is not surprising that journaling when I am afraid, to work through that fear, has become a staple of my daily journaling habit. I have so many examples of working through it just in the past week, that I can break one out and actually write out an example of my journaling techniques in this case here. Note that my personal notes are messier, and that this is just what works for me, and even then, not all the time. Sometimes it just buys me some time, or eases the fear enough for me to gain some much needed perspective, or get on the phone with someone to talk it through. What I’ve written here is deeply personal, so if you comment, please be kind. It’s not easy to write about any of this.
The first and strongest symptoms relating to my cancer were shortness of breath (dyspnea in medical jargon). I’m in remission now, but still within the window where it’s not unlikely for my cancer to return (recurrence in medical jargon). During this time it’s up to me to notice possible recurrence indicating symptoms and flag them to my oncologist (cancer doctor in medical jargon). It’s only up to me: there are no scans, no blood tests, no physical exam that can indicate recurrence. It’s just me going to my doctor to talk about how I felt over the last three months. The main indicator will be the return of the shortness of breath. That same shortness of breath that is at the heart of my PTSD and anxiety attacks.
In short: I really, really don’t like not breathing.
Enter the local weather lately: a never ending heatwave with extreme temperatures and very high humidity that makes breathing outside difficult. Especially when running and walking to and back from protests.
That’s not a great name, but that’s what I’ve got for now. I really recommend doing this with pen and paper, and feel free to destroy it once it’s done if you feel uncomfortable with anyone else accidentally reading it. Take out your journal or a loose piece of paper and write the following down:
Here’s an example of how this all works, from my own journal (warning: this gets pretty dark):
Fear – the shortness of breath that I’m feeling is an early warning that my cancer is back.
Facts – I’m finding it hard to breath outside lately. The heat index is extremely high: high temperatures and high humidity. The air quality index is moderate. I find it difficult but not impossible to exert myself under these conditions – I can still run in the early morning, and I can still walk to places if I need to. I can run normally in the gym, and I can breath normally when I’m inside with the AC on. The shortness of breath started about when the heat wave started. I’m in the 2 year high risk of recurrence window. My lungs aren’t functioning at 100% capacity. I haven’t gotten the results of my cardio-pulmonary exercise test yet.
Feelings – I don’t want to be a burden on my family or my doctor (being “the boy who cried wolf”). I’m terrified of my cancer returning. I’d feel even worse if it returned and I could have raised the flag sooner, and I didn’t because I wasn’t paying enough attention to my body. I would never forgive myself for that.
Fixes – accommodate the weather in my exertion levels and training. Move whatever you can indoors or into cooler hours. Check your breathing status in the gym. Call the hospital to get your CPET results and send them to your lung doctor.
What’s the best outcome – this is nothing, it’s just a result of this heatwave.
What’s the worst outcome – my dyspnea gets worse, and it is the cancer coming back for round 2.
What’s the outcome I would bet on – It’s likely just the weather coupled with my lung situation.
When to check in next – the heatwave will continue well into next week. Check back in next Saturday, after my long run.
We live in a tough world during a tough time. I hope that the ideas here help you out when dealing with whatever curveball life throws at you. The point is to gain more perspective, empathy and some tools when dealing with fear, and most importantly not let all that negativity bounce around in your head. Pen and paper are your friends here, and can help you get out of whatever fear you’re facing. It’s also nice looking back at old fears and realizing that most of them were never realized.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
First thing’s first: if you are looking for a writing pen, then the Majohn Q1 mini fountain pen is likely not for you. While you can purchase it with an extra-fine, fine or medium nib, it’s weird body shape would likely make it uncomfortable for long writing session, and as it’s an eyedropper filler, it’s designed to have a giant ink capacity, normally suitable for long writing sessions.
If, on the other hand, you are looking for a fountain pen to sketch with, the Majohn Q1 may be a very worthy addition to your kit.
I purchased the Majohn Q1 bent nib fountain pen after seeing Paul Heaston use it in one of his sketches. “What is THAT?!” I asked, and immediately set out on getting one. This weird looking fountain pen reminded me of the Tombow Egg pen (google it. I’ll wait), which I always wanted and never got because I couldn’t afford one at the time. The Majohn Q1 appears to have almost the exact same design as the Tombow Egg, with a few minor details in the trim and molding of the grip section. I purchased mine on Amazon for $22.
The box the Majohn Q1 arrives in is good looking enough to gift someone. Inside there’s the pen with the Fude/bent nib installed, a spare medium nib (the bent nib is an “aftermarket” installation) and a glass eyedropper that you can use to fill the pen with. The pen itself comes installed with an o-ring so that it can safely be eyedroppered. I filled mine with De Atramentis Black Document ink, which is waterproof when dry.
Now the Majohn Q1 is a very small pen, that holds a very, very large amount of ink. That’s why I was interested in it, as I thought that it would be a perfect fountain pen to add to my urban sketching kit. I currently use a Sailor Fude DE Mannen fountain pen for my urban sketching, and it’s a favourite among urban sketchers for the expressive, painterly lines it creates. It is, however, very long and pretty unwieldy: difficult to pack, and sometimes awkward to hold. Here are the Majohn Q1, a Lamy AL Star and a Sailor Fude pen laid next to each other, for size comparison:
As you can see, the Majohn Q1 is pocket pen sized in length, and very, very wide. It can’t be used unposted, as is to be expected with pocket pens, but once it’s posted, it just becomes an extra wide standard length fountain pen:
The point of this pen is the bent/Fude nib, so here it is, in all the different line widths it can create:
And here’s the Sailor Fude for comparison:
The Majohn Q1 offers much more line width control and consistency than the Sailor Fude, but you sacrifice some of the painterly quality and dynamism of the Sailor Fude to achieve that control.
The Majohn, like the Sailor, isn’t perfect in terms of gripping experience. While it’s much easier to grip the Majohn in a variety of different angles to get a variety of different lines, there’s a pretty pronounced step between the pen body and the grip section that can be uncomfortable if that’s where your fingers naturally land on. For me, I grasp the pen either closer to the nib, or not on the section at all but rather on the pen body. I’d recommend trying it out first, but for $22, it might be worth it just to buy the pen and try it out for a while.
Here’s a sketch of a friend’s border collies sketched with the Majohn. As you can see, it’s relatively easy to get both a good level of control with this pen, a lot of line variation, and some of that painterly quality to the line that makes it more interesting and expressive.
Here’s the complete sketch, just for fun:
If you’re at all interested in fountain pen sketching, and especially if you are an urban sketcher, I recommend giving the Majohn Q1 bent nib fountain pen a try. It’s easier to control and to transport that a Sailor Fude, and holds a much larger ink capacity, which is great for long sketching sessions or when you need to block out a large section with ink. For such a low price you get quite a lot, and the learning curve is much less steep than with a Sailor Fude DE Mannen fountain pen. I don’t do calligraphy, but I assume that it could be worth a try for calligraphy as well, especially if you are looking for a travel friendly solution. And who knows, maybe you’ll get to feel the temperature of writing while using it…
I’ve been journaling for many years, and ever since I got sick, I’ve expanded my journaling to be much more than a daily log of the things I saw and did. Journaling has turned into a whole treasure trove of tools, and this series will run through them.
The idea starts with writing things down on paper, to add an additional layer of processing to them. Writing by hand is inherently slow, and requires you to focus on what you are doing.
Then do a mental check in: how busy and noisy is your mind right now? If it sounds like a train station during rush hour, the first part of journaling for mental clarity will be emptying your mind onto the page for as long as it takes for things to settle down a bit. Don’t judge what you write, how your handwriting looks, or even if it’s legible or not. This is just anxious noise. You need it out of your brain and that’s all for now.
This is hard to do, because you’ll automatically turn your editor on and try to edit stuff out, or edit things while you write them down. If it helps, write this bit on scrap bits of paper and immediately destroy them once things quiet down in your brain. You don’t need these thoughts, they aren’t the point of this aspect of your journaling. The point is just to achieve some level of calm inside your mind.
Once there’s some quiet up there, create 2-3 prompts for yourself, things that you will reflect upon daily, and will help you achieve more clarity and perspective into where you are in your life. Your goal with these prompts is to find patterns of things that work and don’t work for you in terms of helping you live the life that you want to live, and to discover and appreciate where you are in that given point in time.
I believe that it’s best if you create your own prompts, but to make this post more concrete and practical, here are the three prompts that I’ve settled on (after trial and error):
I answer these at the end of each day, as part of the structured part of my journal (the unstructured part is the daily log/mind dump that I do and will write about in a later post).
What excited me? – I answer this with a short list of things that made me feel good and energized. After doing this for a few days, you’ll see patterns emerge, and this will help you focus your time and energy on doing more of the things that make you feel good. In particularly chaotic days this prompt changes to What calmed me down? This is what made me make more time for my blog, lego building, using my pens, meeting and connecting with friends, at the expense of the things that emerged from the next prompt.
What drained me of energy? – Again, I answer these with a list of things that made me feel bad, sad, annoyed, frustrated, drained, etc. This is what made me cut down on reading the news to once a day, and only the headlines (I live in a chaotic country). It’s also what made me cut down on social media, and eventually delete Instagram and Threads from my phone (I’ve left Twitter long ago, and I barely go into facebook to catch up on event invites). It also made me mute a good number of WhatsApp groups. Yes, you may not be able to do that, but this isn’t the point. The point is find what isn’t working for you, and do your best to minimize or compensate for the pain that it causes. Mute and unfollow, change the interface you use, have someone to talk to after you’ve dealt with a source of frustration, etc.And sometimes it’s just helpful and comforting to see things written down.
What am I grateful for? – gratitude journaling isn’t new, and I know it sounds cliche and corny, but it works for me, and this is a list of my personal prompts. Feel free to pick something else (like “what did I see or read that made me happy?”). I’ve been using this since the day I got my cancer diagnosis, and it’s probably a bit different than your run-of-the-mill gratitude journaling. The point is to find the smallest, most mundane things that I’m grateful for. They have to be specific, and they have to be everyday, because I started using this as an anchor to give me perspective and appreciation for the very fleeting, very fragile lives we live here. So I’m not “grateful for my family”, I’m grateful for the great phone call we had today, or for the kind message they sent me, or for the way they worried about me when I went to the protest. I’m not grateful for my health, because I’m not 100% healthy, so there’s always something to grumble about, right? I am grateful that I felt generally good today, and was able to go on a run, and two long walks, despite the weather being terrible and my lungs working at their maximum and making me anxious. I’m trying to capture the delight I have in the everyday, because all of that, ALL OF THAT, was taken away from me in the middle of 2021 without a moment’s notice, and all of that can be taken away again. I have no illusions about my mortality and the mortality of my loved ones any more, and I realize that the humdrum of our daily lives will make me easily lose sight of that precious knowledge if I don’t take daily account of it.
I tried a whole list of prompts before I settled on these. If you are looking for some prompt inspiration, try watching this video. That’s where the first two or my prompts came from (the gratitude one predates them by about a year). Once you have 2-3 prompts, answer them every day for 2-3 weeks at least and you’ll start to see patterns emerge. Then it’s up to you to decide what to do about those patterns. The first thing I did was leave two WhatsApp groups that I was in, and mute a third one. I gradually worked up to deleting Instagram this week, and we’ll see how that goes. I now check it once a day on my browser, and it’s a terrible experience, but that’s the point. For the last few days I’ve stopped doom scrolling and gotten back to blogging and reading. Hopefully it will hold, and if not, I have the prompts to help me gain clarity and course correct if I want to.
Writing at Large 