Leigh Reyes. My Life As a Verb.

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.

If you have a knife, a collection of thin bamboo sticks originally meant to be home decor, and an idle mind, you can make your own bamboo pen.

Bamboo, knife

Carve diagonally into the tip of the bamboo (if you didn’t pick yours up from a home store, but from your backyard, you’ll have to dry it in the sun first for a couple of days). Go in at a 45º angle first. Then carve the finer details in so that you end up with a teardrop shape.

Shaping the nib

Use small strokes to thin out the tip

Slit the nib

This is it, more or less

The bamboo absorbs some of the ink, of course, but the hollowed-out area can hold a tiny pool.

Dip into ink

Bamboo pen, writing sample

Bamboo pen, fine nib

All the doodles on this Moleskine sketchbook page came out of a single bamboo pen, Waterman Florida Blue and Noodler’s Singapore Sepia.

Bamboo pen doodle

Imagine me, a woman of thirty, trying to grab a rooster by the tail in my grandaunt’s backyard. I didn’t succeed, but my huffing and flailing amused my family. After a good time was had by all, my uncle handed me a tailfeather he picked up. Here, he said, I don’t know what you want it for but you don’t have to scare the chickens to get one.

I wanted to make a quill. I didn’t know about curing the tip with heat, or stripping the feathers for better balance. I had better luck with bamboo, not the least because it couldn’t run away. I used an X-acto knife to shape the tip and hollowed out the pith to create a “reservoir.”

To follow up animal and vegetable, I turned to mineral. Speedball nibs are well and good, but vintage dip pen nibs are mind-opening. I bought an assortment from a seller on FPN more than a year ago, mostly Esterbrook. There are Judge’s Quills and Falcons and Double Elastics. Similar to the proliferation of ballpoint and gel pen designs today, there was a nib for everyone back then.

I prefer the Esterbrook 048 Falcon to a rooster feather.