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?
Still travelling. This one is a 10 minute sketch of the herb garden in Greenwich park, London. Paper is a Cass Art notebook with non watercolour paper that held up surprisingly well.
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.
Such a great looking notebook. Yes, the cover has gold foil on it.
The endpaper is also very good looking:
Front endpaperBack end paper with the Choosing Keeping bird sticker, and details on the notebook.
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.
Ink test page
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.
Closeup on the paper and the ink results.
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.
Massive bleed-through
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.
Eberhard Faber… with the Star. I love everything about the design of this pencil and this box.
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.
Very fetching design
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.
The endcap
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.
Tools used here. Eberhard Faber EFA 1000, Tombow Irojiten, Koh-I-Noor Magic Pencil, Caran d’Ache Design eraser
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.
I was about to write a post about my currently inked pens, when I realized that I hadn’t finished writing up and publishing this post. Such is the state of my blogging backlog that things have been languishing in it since May.
My April London-Paris trip was the first one I made where I had nowhere to buy vintage fountain pens from. Henry the Pen Man (Henry Simpole) had passed away, and Mora Stylos in Paris had closed his shop in the end of December 2022. Would I even buy any fountain pens?
The answer is of course, yes. None of these pens are rare or expensive, but they are fountain pens nonetheless.
The haul: Lamy Joy, Kaweco Sport, Platinum Preppy pens and Platinum ink cartridges, on top of much needed blotting paper.
I had one thing that was a “must buy” for this trip, and I almost didn’t find it: blotting paper. I’m using a Stalogy notebook as my journal these days, and with some juicy ink and nib combinations a piece of blotting paper is necessary. Alas, I was unable to find any in London: not in Choosing Keeping or in Present and Correct or in any bookstore, stationery store or antique/vintage/flea market that I looked in.
Here Paris came to my rescue, with its fabulous Latin Quarter stationery and art supply shops. I found blotting paper, and then got carried away and added a few cheap fountain pens and ink cartridges to my bag.
I already have a Lamy Joy, and they make for great sketching pens, but I wanted one in black and red and to try and sketch with the included 1.5 nib instead of automatically switching it out for a fine or extra fine. There’s a charm to sketches made with bold, thick lines, after all.
The Kaweco Sport in Blueberry was just an impulse buy, because I liked the colour and I have cartridges languishing around that I want to start using. The Platinum Preppies though, there’s a bit of a story there. I bought a few Platinum Preppies in my very early days with fountain pens, and I purchased o-rings and silicon grease with them, intending to convert them to eye-dropper pens. They all cracked. Immediately. After the first use. One of them was even cracked before I used it.
I’m very gentle with my fountain pens, so I was very disappointed with the plastic quality on these, especially after I learned on the Fountain Pen Network that this was a common occurrence. Well, as I couldn’t care less for the ink cartridges supplied with this pens, I didn’t use them. For me the Platinum Preppy was trash.
Time passed and the Preppy kept getting recommended as a great beginner fountain pen, to my bafflement. It cracks, so why recommend it? Then again, I stopped seeing reports of cracked Preppies. Could Platinum have changed the plastic? Were they all using boring old Platinum blue cartridges and ignoring the cracks?
So when I saw a bunch of Preppies in a Paris art supply store (the wonderful Rougier & Plé) I decided to take a closer look. Wow! They come with purple ink now! And there’s a black ink one too… I decided to give them a try and add a few ink cartridges to my purchase too. The Platinum cartridges are proprietary ones, but I do have a Plaisir, so if all my Preppies crack, I can always use them with the metal-bodied Platinum Plaisir.
Sailor Studio fountain pen inks
I also purchased two Sailor Studio inks at “Choosing Keeping” in London. The Sailor Studio 340 is a calm greyish powder blue and the 743 is an electric purply blue, and I love them both. These are expensive inks, and so they’re a rare treat for me, one that I indulge in rarely.
I’m working on my backlog of posts after about a month of hiatus (work and health related) so here’s a look into more of my haul from my latest London trip.
Muji happened to have a sale on its standard pen sets, so I bought a pouch of these 0.38 gel pens (I think that Zebra makes their refills but I’m not sure) to have around. There are 10 pens in the set, and my plan is to bring them into the office to have them around as occasional highlighters, pens to doodle with or pens to loan with no expectations of seeing them again.
The red Olfa Touch Knife was an impulse buy and is the thing I use most from this bunch. I used it while gift wrapping books, I used it to open packages, and I’m using it now to open Lego bags for my current build (the large Disney Castle). This is a nifty and handy little tool and I’ll probably buy another one at some point as a backup. The bronze paper clip is just a nicer version of the clip that I use to keep my pocket Stillman and Birn Alphas shut, as they don’t come with any kind of elastic closure.
The gold bics are from Present and Correct and they made me laugh. I plan on giving one away to a designed friend, in the hopes that it will make her laugh too. I used to use them so much when I was a teenager (before gel ink pens became widely available) and I hated them so much that having a gold one is just beyond perfect.
The black and yellow pen is the Bauhaus edition of the Leuchtturm1917 Drehgriffel Nr. 1 ballpoint. It’s a twist mechanism aluminium and brass hexagonal ballpoint pen that comes with a blue refill. I reviewed the gel ink version (identical apart from the refill) here. I purchased this pen in London Graphic Centre near Seven Dials/Covent Garden, and it was completely an impulse buy. Should you buy one yourself? If you’re in need of a pocketable ballpoint that doesn’t use a click mechanism, then maybe. Ergonomically it’s not the best for long writing sessions, and the twist mechanism doesn’t make it great for quick deployment, so there are better options in the market. The design is very fetching, and if you like it you might be willing to overlook the pen’s shortcomings. The Bauhaus edition was created as a companion to Leuchtturm’s Bauhaus notebooks.
Drehgriffel Nr. 1 Bauhaus ballpoint.
I bought the Drehgriffel ballpoint to accompany the Drehgriffel mechanical pencil that I bought at the same time. The pencil is fire engine red and grey with silver trim, and the pen is black and yellow with brass trim, and the pencil is slightly heavier than the pen, though they’re both the same size.
Pen on top, pencil on the bottom.
I also got two carrying cases, one a blue Cordura pen case from Midori. The case is called the two way pouch, and it appears very well made.
Midori two way pouch.
The pouch is divided into two identical compartments (hence the name) each with a small divider/pocket inside. It also has a prominent and robustly built handle. I am considering using this pen case for my Caran d’Ache neocolors, but we’ll see.
The second case is a heavily discounted net pouch from Muji. This is going into my travel backpack as a way to keep easily lost bits and bobs together and easily found.
The net side of the Muji case
The net is just on one side of the case, which is perfect, as it allows you to see what’s inside the pouch and also have this little bag have some sort of body and structure to it due to the solid side.
The solid side of the Muji case next to the Drehgriffel pencil and pen.
I also bought a solid plastic box for the my neocolors at Muji, but I decided not to use if for them in the end. It was too small for them and they rattled around in it and made a racket every time I walked, and I didn’t like that.
All in all this was probably my most “impulse buy” bit of the trip, and I’m OK with that. Compared to previous years I’ve really toned down my “must try all the pens in the world to find just the perfect one!” tendencies. If you’re reading this I assume that you can relate. Now to just use it all…
While I’ve really cut down on physical book purchases, especially while I’m abroad, I always end up buying a few books, and this last trip was no different. On Thursdays there’s a decent antique market in Spitalfields (it also includes several food carts and a good selection of vintage clothes stalls, plus it’s a few minutes away from Brick Lane), and I oftentimes find interesting things there. I’ll likely write a separate post about my haul there, but I did get three Arthur Ransome Swallows and Amazons series books: We Didn’t Mean to go to Sea”, “The Big Six” and “The Picts and the Martyrs”. They’re hardbacks in decent condition, with the dust jackets and the original Ransome illustrations, and I’m very glad that I found them half hidden in a comics and book stall. Ransome is an excellent British children’s book author, and if you liked the Famous Five and the Secret Seven or Kipling’s children’s book writing you’ll likely enjoy Ransome’s work.
The other two books are paperbacks that I bought at Waterstone’s Piccadilly while waiting for a friend (I’m not to be trusted in bookstores). I’ve been wanting to read something by Lawrence Durrell for a long time and “White Eagles Over Serbia” seems like a good place to start. J.L. Carr is a superb writer, and although I’m not sold on “How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup”‘s subject matter, “A Month in the Country” was good enough for me to want to give this a try.
I still have April’s book backlog to finish reading, but these two books are next on my list.
While I was in London I went to Present and Correct and purchased mostly woodcase pencils (and some paraphernalia). Here’s a breakdown of what I got there and why:
Blackwing Eras – I also purchased the previous Eras pencils from Present and Correct. These are very expensive (and overpriced) but after hemming and hawing I decided to splurge. These have the extra firm Blackwing core, which I enjoy writing and sketching with, with a little bit of zing with the nostalgic arrow punch design. I have a project in mind for them, and will feature them in a separate post them.
Eberhard Faber pencils. These are vintage, and I’ll post a review of them separately, but they are gorgeous and I love vintage pencils, so these were the first thing that I got once I saw them.
Musgrave Tennessee Red – I have several boxes of these, and yet I got another one. These pencils are gorgeous, and they’re great for both writing and sketching. Some people find their corners too sharp and prefer the rounds, but I’ve yet to obtain the round Tennessee Reds, so I can’t compare between them. I wrote a review of them here.
Mitsu-Bishi 9850 and 9852 – Japanese pencils. The 9850 is for “office use” and the 9852 is a “master writing” pencil. I have only one or two 9850s and I wanted a pack because they are excellent pencils. I haven’t tried the 9852s I think, and anything with that wild green and pink package with “master writing” on it is a must.
Loose USSR vintage pencils and graphite stick – I got these as a gift for my purchase at Present and Correct, together with the…
Faber Castell Goliath – a wide barrelled vintage, USA bonded pencil that was meant for school children just learning to write.
Woodcased pencil haul (and one graphite stick – the one to the immediate left of the Goliath)
I also got a set of salmon coloured Japanese pencil sharpeners there – I have another two sets that I bought there and enjoyed – one that I’ve gifted and one that I regularly use. There are surprisingly few pencil sharpeners of this kind that are actually good, and these are very convenient for my sketching kits as they are small and light.
I also got two mechanical pencils, one from London Graphic Centre in Covent Garden, and one from Gibert Joseph in Paris:
Sharpener set and two mechanical pencils
The top pencil is the Leuchtturm1917 Drehgriffel Nr. 2 mechanical pencil (purchased at London Graphic Centre). I will be writing a review of it once I get to use it a bit more, but for now I’ll just say that it’s an attractive desk object.
The bottom pencil is the rotring 600 in camouflage green. It’s the rotring 600 – one of the best drafting pencils out there – and the colour is a dark racing green that makes it look black upon casual glance. I bought this pen at Gibert Joseph in Paris and was about to go for the red rotring 600 when I realized that what I had thought was a standard black rotring 600 was indeed the green one. The colour is difficult to reproduce, but I find it fetching and intriguing, so I’m glad that I went for it instead of its red or blue counterparts.
Drehgriffel above and rotring 600 below
Overall I’m happy with my purchases, and can’t wait to start using them.
The Phoenix Community Garden at the heart of Soho, London is one of my favourite places on earth. How much do I love this place, that was brought to greenery out of the ashes of a parking lot? I visualised it while I was going through my first and very painful biopsy. I won’t go into the gory details, but suffice to say that it took a very powerful positive memory to help me keep my body still during the intense pain of the procedure.
I love this new sign.
The garden is a haven for plants, people and wildlife in the heart of a busy city, and it is full of character. You get to see how bits of masonry and bobs of donations are recycled into a joyful mishmash of urban gardening.
No two benches here are alike, every pot and container has something weird or unique going on (from smurfs to little signs).
There’s a pond surrounded by broken paving that even has some goldfish moseying along in it.
And the place is cleverly built to be full of books, crannies, corners and elevation shifts, making it look much larger than it is.
I managed to get a quick sketch in before the rain started, nothing too fancy as my neuropathy was terrible today.
Find yourself a bit of green to find joy in today. We could all use a bit more of that.
I felt like sketching London again, so this is from a photo taken during one of my runs in Hyde Park in September. Tombow Fudenosuke hard brush pen, Faber Castell Pitt brush pens on an A4 Midori MD Cotton notebook.
Writing at Large 