Leigh Reyes. My Life As a Verb.

This is the blog entry equivalent of a Halloween candy assortment.

Muji binder, Muji blank refills. Swan pen.

A hard rubber Parker Lucky Curve.

My old character in Second Life. She’s been retired. I quite like the glasses. I also wish I had this top in real life.

Mike did a pencil sketch of me one day when he was bored. That man has wicked skills.

My own definition of happiness. Shared by many who are reading this, I hope.

“Her visions had so many wonders there was no room for stars.” I don’t know what that means.

I don’t know where the original of this is. It’s a sketch done in pastel of a shoe I actually owned. It was red ostrich with a 4-inch stacked heel. I would be committing suicide if I were to walk in this today. Time is not kind to ankles.

It is also not my friend today, because it ran out before I could manage a coherent blog entry.

In jewelry, this pair would be called a demi-parure. I am dusting off that word and putting it here because the Moore 72 belongs to a time when women had parures and reticules. And tiny hands.

The seller described the pen and pencil as made of plastic, but I think the material is black celluloid. There is a very faint smell that could be camphoraceous. The tops are pearlized plastic, and add Art Deco sleekness to the set.

The pencil is the heavier of the two. Only the pen has an imprint.

The pen comes with Moore’s Maniflex nib. In my experience, Maniflex nibs are not full flex, but semi-flex. This one is no exception.

The set just radiates cuteness. The shiny black surface reminds me of a little girl’s black patent Mary Janes.

Here’s a writing sample.

They make the Nakaya Long Piccolo look like a humongous predator.

I hope I don’t get addicted to collecting sets!

One day I woke up and had a Koh-i-noor leadholder family. From top to bottom: tiny Koh-i-noor 2mm for planner fiends; 3.8 mm with curvaceous clip for those who find 5, 5.5 and 5.6 mm way too much; green 5.6 mm; green 2mm with knurled grip.

The Lamy Scribble in stealth black is great for what it’s named after. 3.15 mm lead, sharpener bought separately but had to be bought because it was red.

Usually, leadholders come with built-in sharpeners. I couldn’t resist picking these up anyway. The big one is for 5.5/5.6 mm lead; the Faber-Castell takes 2 and 3mm.

The most unusual leadholder in my collection is the Cleo Skribent Der Gessner. Dave’s Mechanical Pencils blog has a comprehensive review. My version is the cheaper one, with a rustic hessian pouch instead of leather.

Holding the lead in place is a tapered inner sleeve.

It slides down the hollow barrel until it reaches the wide part of the sleeve. A little push and twist, and it’s secure.

Today, history’s first modern pencil (designed by Conrad Gessner in the 16th century) seems quaint, a toy for the nostalgic. The practical-minded will certainly prefer the regular wood-encased pencil. Still, I’m happy to live in a time when pens can write upside down in space and companies recreate 16th century pencil technology. Efficiency makes life easy, but it is poor food for the spirit.

The latest notebook I have decided to hoard is the Midori MD.

MD notebooks are available online. I see there’s a place called The Journal Shop and of course, Rakuten. If I can’t get out of the country and must swallow the heavy shipping cost, I will just close my eyes and think of how lovely the wrapping paper is.

This is the notebook equivalent of wearing cream linen slacks while walking down a busy Manila street.

Branding, literally.

The paper is honeyed cream, easy on the eyes, somewhat translucent, crazy smooth, and highly resistant to bleedthrough. Ink takes a little longer to dry, and will definitely smear for the impatient. (Note fishnet smear on the left page.) (Note I am very, very impatient.)

Brush pen and ink. The paper color here is more accurate.

And more samples.

In between the back cover and the last page, a surprise – stickers.

I would like stickers that don’t make me feel too pressured to write “Ideas.” I suggest “Accidents,” “Nothing Much,” “Nooneenooneenoo,” and “Whatever.”

The Sailor pen wrap is so orange, it will never get lost in your bag. This is a good thing.

The leather is smooth, the edges are evenly stitched, and the inside is lined with shiny nylon. It can hold 3 medium-girth pens. There is an inside pocket for notecards or business cards.

The Sailor logo is subtly stamped inside.

If I could wish for anything, it would be a flap to cover the top of the pens, and to prevent them from sliding out of the case when it accidentally turns upside down in my bag. This happens more often than I like because my bags (repeat after me) “hold entire universes.”

Whoever thought of this at Pilot deserves both a big hug and a tiny kick.

There are other versions of this set, and Alberto Lung of robotninjamonsters reviews one in his Kid Sketching blog. It seems that Pilot has addressed customer feedback regarding portability, and now the set comes with a cloth carry case.

I have a Pilot Croquis leadholder, and 6B leads for it. This was the first time I saw the watercolor leads, so of course I had to bring them home. I wasn’t expecting much by way of pigment intensity, but the packaging added much to the set’s appeal. When opened, the cloth case has a pocket for the plastic palette on the left, and individual pockets for the Croquis pencils on the right.

I don’t know if there’s such a thing as being too organized when it comes to watercolor sets. So many compartments for such a flimsy plastic palette! The waterbrush is of good quality. For some reason I was expecting a blue sponge, then remembered that the Pentel Aquash watercrayon set is the one that has it.

I took the pencils out for a spin. My usual technique is coloring then wetting, although with these pencils one can also shave the lead into one of the palette wells and dissolve with water.

I used a lightweight sketch paper for these samples, hence the buckling. The texture is soft and crumbly.

It dissolves easily, which is a plus.

Let’s pretend this is a flower. I deliberately held back on dissolving all the color because I like leaving some clue as to the material origin of my doodles.

My camera was having a bad day, and so was my color correction. Don’t mind the pinkness of the paper – the droopy flower is very close to its real-life color.

Pilot gets big hugs for the cuteness, portability, and real-life usefulness of this set. The tiny kick is for the cheap plastic palette, which I fear will crease badly and tear within a few days of use, it’s that flimsy. Can anyone suggest a replacement (or an easy instructable)?

Presenting the ultimate non-disposable writing instrument: the beta pen. With a tip made from a special alloy (that includes lead), it makes marks on paper with metal, the way people used to before graphite and pencils. In the past, artists used wire clamped in a stylus or even bare. You can try that technique today – I know I will, when I find the time.

The beta pen looks like a fancy pencil. It’s heavy. I chose the black finish. @dowdyism featured the pocket version on his blog and on Flickr.

It comes with an explanatory leaflet. I share it with you because I am lazy and do not wish to paraphrase.

It’s not just a novelty item to whip out at dull meetings.

Writing with metal isn’t like writing with graphite. What it feels like is dry-writing with an extra-fine nib. It’s toothy but not irritatingly so. The strokes don’t get too dark, even when layered. When I was taking a shot of my first experiment with the beta pen and watercolor, I noticed that the metal marks caught the light and almost seemed to sparkle.

So I decided to take a shot of metalpoint side-by-side with graphite. Held away from the light, the two are difficult to tell apart.

I see the sparkles when I hold the paper at another angle.

On a yellow Post-It the sheen was even more obvious.

I don’t think it will replace a regular pencil (for one, it’s not erasable). There are also those who prefer darker marks, like the ones made by 2B lead, and this is closer to an HB or even an H. I like the weight of history the beta pen carries, for all its modern styling. I’ll keep it.

I downloaded MacJournal to see if I can return to offline editing, the way I used to with iBlog.

Graffiti from June 30, 1921.

I’ve been liking brush pens lately. From none, I now own three. One of them is the Akashiya Bamboo brush pen, which I must admit I bought because it was made of bamboo plus it had butterflies on it.

There is a butterfly on the cap.

There are two butterflies on the barrel, but I don’t think they’re ganging up on the loner up there.

The cap pulls off to reveal a plastic section. That section unscrews from the barrel so you can put in a cartridge or converter. This brush pen came with a box of 3 cartridges. I believe a Platinum converter will fit (if I remember the jetpens write-up correctly). The brush is made of synthetic hair, and reminds me of the Aquash brush.

To allow the plastic section to screw in, there is a threaded brass fitting inside the bamboo barrel.

The brush pen is longer than ordinary pens, and feels very light and easy to use.

It is slightly longer, capped, than a full-length colored pencil.

It takes some getting used to. For this one, I wanted to make very fast, loose strokes.

This one has more detail. (Obviously done during a longer meeting than the previous doodle.)

The ink in the supplied cartridges dries very glossy and black. I hope it’s available in bottles.

Good pens can come by way of good pen friends, and this set would not be here without the kindness of Andy Russell. In my little pen world, he’s the Conway Stewart-and-other-English-pens encyclopedia.

Students who struggled through Shakespeare might catch the allusion. Ophelia said, “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance” in Hamlet. My Rosemary set came in a presentation box, whose colors make me think of Van Gogh’s sunflowers caught in the rain. Then, as now, pens were popular gifts. According to writetime.co.uk, Rosemary pens were established in the early to mid 1920s.

The golden-colored foil lining is mostly intact. Inside the box is a product leaflet and a black reticule. (I love that word. Reticule. Mmm. So much better than purse.)

Rosemary seems to have been a sub-brand of National Security, which in turn was a mark owned by British Carbon Papers, Ltd. British Carbon outsourced the manufacture of these pens to other English pen makers, including Conway Stewart.

Inside the reticule (made flirty with a swinging tassel!), everything a bright young lady zipping around the city needs. A pencil to dash off a grocery list, a powder puff in crushed silk to freshen up between appointments, a ringtop fountain pen for thank-you notes, and a pocket comb to smooth adventurous ringlets before rushing home.

Here’s another shot of the set.

Whoever owned this set took it out once in a while to admire it, and used the pen and pencil sparingly.

I have many RMHR (red mottled hard rubber) pens in my collection. These are very fine examples. I’m lucky they were kept in their reticule, away from sunlight. And the imprints are stunning. I love how the y descender in Rosemary loops up and becomes a sprig of what else, rosemary.

The nib is smooth and firm. I wasn’t able to take pictures of writing samples; I’ll do that next week.

Thanks, Andy, for paving the way for me to have this sweet piece of history.