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.

Poor Pentel brush pen. It didn’t do anything wrong. I just wanted to see if I could use fountain pen ink in it.

I took off the white ring as instructed. Then I removed the stopper from the ink cartridge. (The cartridge is also the body.) The stopper isn’t meant to be removed; it’s there to regulate the flow of ink from the body to the brush.

It took some time to pump and rinse out the ink from the cartridge. I wasn’t that successful – while I squeezed the cartridge under water 23,954 times, black-tinted water still came out. (Squeezing out the ink isn’t a straightforward operation. The flow is very controlled, and there seems to be a second layer of material inside the cartridge.)  I squeezed it one last time, plunged it into a bottle of Pilot Iroshizuku tsutsuji ink, and wondered what the result would be.

(Yes, the tsutsuji stained the paper label on the brush pen. It looks like rivers of fuchsia lava underneath black rock.)

Tsutsuji (fuchsia) + excess water + remnants of black ink = a serious, don’t-mess-with-me purple. As the excess water evaporates from the brush tip, I expect the lines to be not as watercolor-y, but more solid. I’m happy with this hack, and hope for non-bamboo doodles to come.