These two sketches were both done on the soft covered vegan Italian made Cass Art sketchbook. It has recycled paper inside which doesn’t look like or behave like recycled paper.
I sketched this in 3-4 minutes while sitting in the Phoenix Community Garden in London, and then took a lot of reference photos with my phone.
Later on I added watercolour to the sketch:
This is a 5-7 minute sketch of the stalls in Spitalfield market done with a sepia Faber Castell Pitt pen on the same Cass Art notebook.
I bought this sketchbook on a complete whim, because it was relatively inexpensive and I liked the look of it. I liked it so much I returned later on and bought a second sketchbook with a different cover colour.
What surprising and unexpectedly good products have you found lately?
While most of my fountain pen collection consists of vintage fountain pens, I understand that for many people purchasing vintage fountain pens is too risky. You might get a pen that needs repair, you might misjudge the value of the pen and overpay considerably, you might be buying a fake. As even the cheapest of vintage pens isn’t just a few bucks, making a mistake here could end up being very expensive.
Yet there’s a joy in vintage items, in seeing the craftsmanship, design and care put into them, in learning their history and placing them on a timeline, and in the knowledge that you saved something from the landfill. If you want to experience some of that joy with less of the risk of buying vintage fountain pens, vintage pencils are your friend. Flea markets are full of vintage pencils, pencil tins, pencil sharpeners, leadholders, etc that are usually very cheap to buy, and hold little to no risk.
When I was in Spitalfields market, buying vintage books, I saw this tin propped up against a bookshelf in the stall I was purchasing my Arthur Ransome books from. This is how it looked:
Grimy but not full of rust or beaten up A.W. Faber Castell pencil tin.
It’s an A.W. Faber Castell pencil tin, and after just a few minutes with some wet wipes it already started to look better:
A bit cleaned up.
The tin and the pencils inside cost me only a few pounds, and truth be told I would probably have purchased the tin even if it was empty. The design and typography are absolutely delightful:
Castel 9000 2H. I can imagine having a stack of these in different lead grades on a shelf.
The over packaging continues inside – you wouldn’t want your pencils rattling around in the tin, would you?
Paper insert to protect the pencils inside.
Faber Castell’s factory in Stein proudly represented on the outer tin and here too:
A.W Faber-Casterll, Stein Bei Nürnberg
Inside were about half of the original Faber-Castell 9000 2H pencils, and half pink advertising pencils for a thread company that I think no longer exists.
It’s like opening a box of chocolates – you never know what you get
Faber-Castel 9000 are excellent artist pencils, and the vintage ones are just as great as the current ones in production, only they’re usually cheaper and have much better typography and logos on them. Look at this little masterpiece:
Vintage pencils always have a ton of stuff stamped on them. You needed the INFO, right?
The pink pencils were round advertising pencils, for a German thread making company that seems to no longer exist. They are solid HB pencils, and have an 80s sort of vibe to them.
Advertising pencils.
The great joy of vintage pencils is that they of course write just as they used to when they were originally made. If they have erasers they’re going to be unusable (these pencils don’t), and sometimes the wood is a bit brittle and dried out so a bit more care needs to be taken whilst sharpening them (these pencils are in excellent condition), but otherwise time affects pencils very little.
Writing samples
So next time you’re at a flea or antique market, rummage around its hidden corners for some cool old pencils to try out. You never know what you’ll find — I picked up some Sanford Noblots from a giant jar of pencils that way.
P.S. If you’re wondering, 2H pencils are perfect for watercolour under-sketches, as so long as you keep your pressure light, they disappear beneath the paint.
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.
protest sketch
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.
tools used.
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.
Our friend Joe.
Now go rummage in your stationery/art supply stash and find something new to play with. It’s guaranteed to make you smile.
This is the last sketch that will focus on individual tree foliage, and this one is dedicated to the striking Japenese Weeping Maple and it’s vivid red leaves. Midori MD A4 Cotton notebook and various brush pens.
The grey bark of the sugar maple make its orange foliage pop even more. Drawn with a Kuretake fudegokochi extra fine brush pen which I do not recommend for any sort of artwork – it takes ages to dry, and isn’t stable until it’s completely dry, and even then you can’t trust it not to make a mess of your artwork. Also used Faber Castell Pitt brush pens (which I do recommend) on an A4 Midori MD Cotton notebook.
There’s no real autumn here, and I really miss the leaves changing colour and an actual autumnal season, so I decided to dedicate the next few inktober sketches to trees in autumn. The first is ginko biloba, with its gorgeous golden leaves. This was sketched with a Pentel GFKP brush pen, the king of brush pens, and Faber Castell Pitt brush pens on an A4 Midori MD Cotton notebook.
So a few years back I was at the main branch of a local art supply change while they were getting rid of a large amount of inventory by slashing down its prices. I was there to stock up on art supplies, and most of the sale inventory consisted of poorly made knock-off pens and no-name novelty print pencils, so I skipped the sale baskets and made a beeline for the tills. As I was standing in line my eye caught a small basket in the corner of the nearest sale table. It looked like it was full of Faber-Castell 9000 pencils offered at a 10th of the price of a Faber-Castell 9000. I left the line and went to investigate.
Don’t they look like Faber-Castel 9000s?
Now my go to pencil for sketching is the Faber-Castell 9000, and although they are excellent pencils, they are not cheap, and I use to go through quite a lot of them. Here I was offered a pencil that looked like a Faber-Castell 9000, was made by Faber-Castell, at a “practically free” price. I couldn’t test them, as they were all unsharpened, but I dug in and grabbed a few of the weird assortment of harnessed on offer: 2B, HB and 4H.
They were Faber-Castell Regent 1250 pencils made in Brazil, and what little I could find about them was people saying that they don’t compare to 9000s. I of course planned to add them into my rotation, which is why I almost immediately lost them. This happens quite often with pencils in my house, since my cat loves to steal them and play with them, so I usually hide the good ones and let him play with ones that I care less about. The result is that when it comes time to looking for a certain pencil I only have a vague idea about the various areas it can be in.
Now that I’ve found them, to the review:
The Faber-Castell Regent 1250 are Brazilian made pencils that look like twins of the Faber-Castell 9000, minus the grey band on the tip. They don’t seem to be widely available outside Brazil, which is both frustrating and understandable. The Regent 1250 poses a risk to the 9000 sales: it’s a much cheaper counterpart that offers graphite performance that’s on par with the 9000. Artists aren’t usually swimming in money, and if FC made the 1250 widely available my guess is that their 9000 sales would take a significant hit.
The gold foil branding appears on only one side of the pencil, and the lacquer appears rough, but not to a point where you’d actually feel it in use.
The Regent 1250’s body is where is where it falls short of the 9000, though I sincerely believe that not enough to justify the reviews that it has gotten so far. The 1250 is cheap and offered in Brazil because it’s made of abundant cheap Brazilian wood. The result is a pencil with a woodcase that doesn’t sharpen as nicely or easily as a 9000, and that has a somewhat rougher finish when it comes to the lacquering.
Made in Brazil. The 4H is a darker green and has a different imprint on it, which makes me thing that it was made during a different time period that the 2B and HB.
The wood is not terrible, and it doesn’t chip and break in large chunks. You just have to put a little more elbow grease when sharpening with a sharpener. If you sharpen with a knife you probably won’t feel the difference at all. The lacquer isn’t pretty: you can see pits and bumps in it, though they are not deep enough for you to actually feel them. The wood on the pencil isn’t consistent in its looks or particularly attractive.
The different appearance of the wood between the 4H and the other two pencils leads me to believe that it was made during a different time period.
These pencils only look premium from a distance. Up close they look battered and bruised. However, these are meant to be artist tools not museum pieces, and what’s most important about them is their graphite. Everything else has to be good enough, and so far it’s been good enough.
I doubt that if I saw two sketches, one made with 9000s and one made with 1250s, that I could tell the two apart. The graphite looks and behaves practically the same, both in drawing and erasing.
Regent 1250 4H on Baron Fig Confidant
It’s so tempting to look down at these pencils as cheap trash, but look what you can create with them:
Regent 1250 HB at work.
The graphite is smooth, the pencils hold a point for a long, long time, and they’re a joy to use, especially since I don’t have to feel so precious about them.
Regent 1250 2B
If anything I wish I could have purchased a wider range of Regent 1250, but seeing how they work I doubt that FC would ever widely offer them outside Brazil, as they would cannibalize the sales of their 9000.
Regent 1250 HB on a Baron Fig Confidant.
It’s frustrating knowing that a company has the ability to offer a good product for artists at a non-premium price and chooses not to. I understand the market forces at play, but I still find them annoying. And to all those who had a chance to use a 1250 and looked down on it: don’t judge a pencil by its lacquer.
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:
Is it not pretty?
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 dark side of the pen.
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.
Between light and dark.
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?
Look at that!
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.
The finial/top disc.
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.
Writing at Large 