TIM BAKER

This blog isn’t meant for equipment reviews, but I’ve been testing quite a few liner and brush pens recently. I’ve found surprisingly that not all the ones that are marked ‘waterproof’ are, well that waterproof or take an age to dry. This is a problem as I found yesterday standing in the freezing cold trying to do a pen and watercolour and found that the pen I’d just bought – which will remain nameless until later – started to just wash away. I didn’t have time to let it dry, and compared to my usual Staedtler or even Pilot it was disappointingly slow in drying.

So I thought I’d do a review roundup! It’s not completely comprehensive – I can’t afford to test say, every pen and Rotring isn’t included – but these are many of the cheaper pens in my local art shop. But I tried to make it as scientific and fair as possible. Also not being paid or given freebies to review (chance would be a fine thing) so I have no dog in this fight.

Pens in the review are 5 different makes of liner/technical pens I use for sketching, and 2 makes of brush/calligraphy pens. Most of the pens are from Japan, which seems to pretty much own the pen market, with Staedtler the lone European standout, and the Unipin made in Vietnam.

The pens are:

• Uni pin Fine Line from Mitsubishi, 0.7mm
• Pilot Drawing Pen, 0.8mm
• Sakura Pigma Micron 08, rather confusingly this is actually 0.5mm
• Staedtler Pigment Liner 0.7mm
• Zebra Zensations Technical Drawing 0.8
• Tombow WS-BS 150 Fudenosuke Soft Black Calligraphy pen
• Sakura Pigma MB XFVK-MB-49 Brush pen, medium

All of these pens are the black versions, and claim to be lightfast (I don’t buy pens that don’t guarantee that) and waterproof apart from the Tombow which with a water-based ink, it makes no special claims…which as we see later is interesting given the results of the tests.

The Pilot Technical Drawing is what I used for the ‘fist’ watercolour and again I like the flow, it’s very usable. The style is very 80’s though, probably the most boring and staid looking pen of the bunch. The blurb from Pilot says it has “fast-drying water and light-resistant pigment ink” – hmm, we’ll see. And some blather about a “durable polyacetal pen tip resists bending and lasts a long time” – not sure about that, it seems the same as the others. Price wise, this is one of the more expensive pens, as Pilot seems to be.

Sakura Pigma Micron 08 is new to me, got it today so haven’t really used it in anger yet – will do tonight at life drawing most likely. One of the nicer looking pens, the only odd thing is the numbering system. If a pen is called ’08’ you expect it to be 0.8mm right? WRONG KLAXON! It’s actually 0.5mm, the 04 is 0.45mm and the 0.3 is 0.4mm. Obviously Sakura live in some topsy-turvy world…Again it’s a pigment ink, boasting being for “waterproof and fade proof lines” and says it’s archival ink, which I never really trust, although it conforms to ASTM D 4236, which a few others do as well (I’ll mark the ones that claim that). Pricewise it’s midrange, you’d expect it to be more but Pigma pens seems to be reasonable, cheaper or comparable to Staedtlers.

I’ve been using Staedtler Pigment Liners for ages, since Cult Pens sent me a bonus random purple one on an order…but I’ve bought many more since. The only issue I have with Staedtlers is they don’t last long, hence looking at other pens. It’s pigment ink that conforms to ASTM D 4236, “indelible (in accordance with ISO 14145-2), lightfast, waterproof” and can allegedly survive the cap being off for over 12 hours, although that claim seems to constantly shift in number from 12 hours, to 18 and 21 hours in different places, so I side-eye that. I mean which is it? Price wise they tend to mid-range to expensive, especially as they don’t last long. But if you hunt around on Amazon you can find cheaper packs of pens that bring the unit cost down.

Apparently I bought a Zebra Zensations Technical Drawing pen and forgot about it. I didn’t think I had one…until I did. Spook. Well that makes this test more rounded, and although it’s less black than the other pens here, the flow is one of the best, and it feels really good. Also it’s the cheapest here, or one of them. Again claims “Archival quality” “Water resistant and fade proof” and more blurb “Vibrant black archival quality ink” and “Quick drying ink for a bleed free, smudge free, water-proof writing experience”. Mmmkay. Like a few others have the ACMI logo. IHNI what that is, a brief Google shows it to be an industry thing that it won’t poison you, which seems to be the ASTM thing I mentioned. Yay, I guess? Me neither. *shrug*

The nicest pen of the bunch, for a Japanophile like me is the Tombow WS-BS 150 Fudenosuke Soft Black. It might not be the most helpful since most of it is in Japanese but hell, it’s the coolest. As I said above, there are almost no ‘claims’ for this pen, it’s water-based and it comes in soft and hard brush heads. It’s very cool for sketching if you like brush-like brush strokes. Or for calligraphy or Japanese writing, if that’s your bag. Price is towards the more expensive, not as much as the Pilot but getting there.

Cheaper than the Tombow is the Sakura Pigma MB which does make claims – “Archival quality Pigma Ink – chemically stable, waterproof, and fade resistant” and “No smears, feathers, or bleed-through on most papers” – umm yeah…stylistically as a stationary fetishist, it’s probably the most boring of the pens like the Pilot, looking like a fairly bog standard felt-tip. The sizes are fine, medium and bold, I have the bold brush as well, and apparently the nibs are “[Fine] – a tough plastic polyacetal material [Medium] a tough nylon material [Bold] – a tough porous polyethylene material”. It sez here. Price is mid-range to cheap.

So that’s the claims, how do they work in practice?

The testing was done on 280gsm watercolour paper, Crawford & Black so not the most expensive…I’ve tried some of these tests on other paper and have confirmed some of the results, especially with the Uni Pin. Using a waterbrush on each mark for 2-3 seconds at various intervals of drying (30 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes, 10 minutes).

You can see two tests, I redid the first ones with a bowl of water because I didn’t want any accidental transfer between marks to sway the tests. I also wondered if 1 minute was too long, so did 30 seconds as well.

The Results

Well no surprise for me, the villains of the piece is the Uni Pin and Pigma MB. The Uni Pin is what started this test, the aforementioned pen that started washing away when I attempted a watercolour in a freezing park (and I had left it many minutes before I started working with watercolour sticks, as I had to apply the sticks first so it had plenty of time to dry)

I’ve confirmed this on other paper on a drawing I did several hours before…it should have been VERY dry, and it still washed off! Oddly it did really well in Test One, but Test Two revealed it’s unreliable nature.

Staedtler didn’t do as well as I hoped, but still pretty good and usable, and the Pilot did exactly what I expected, I thought my lines smeared when I worked on my hand images.

So the surprise winner is the Pigma Micron, very closely followed by the Zebra Zensation, then the Staedtler in third place. The Pigma JUST edges it in not being as ‘smeary’ in the 1min, 5 min marks – but Zebra aces it when dried for longer. And given it’s the cheapest, that might be the choice for many, if you can live with it being slightly less ‘black’ than the others.

Oddly of the brush pens, the Tombow did very well, far better than the Pigma MB, despite no claims of waterproof-ness. This caught me out when I was doing life sketches last week, I was expecting the Tombow to be usable to create washes and found it dried FAR too quickly to do that, so used the Pigma MB. So the Tombow is a surprise winner there.

But the ultimate result is that ALL of these pens actually smear slightly on watercolour paper with watercolour, just some do it more. I’ve done other tests with the Uni, Staedtler and Pilot after 30 mins and yes they still do this, just the Uni does it far worse than the others. So the moral is: let them dry as much as possible, or stick to the pens that are faster drying and accept they will bleed a bit, it seems ‘waterproof’, ‘water resistant’ and ‘indelible’ doesn’t mean what I think it should mean