One particular artist who seems to have worked in a similar vein is the late, great Aubrey Beardsley. Born in 1872 and tragically dying of tuberculosis at the age of 25, he led an interesting life and really made the most of those few years. He’s best known for associating with Oscar Wilde, drawing many illustrations for his literary works. Beardsley worked almost exclusively with ink and paper, though little seems to be known about his actual process.
Of course, how the art is made is usually only of great importance to the artist and not something generally advertised to the public. There is a good reason for this in that it can give people the wrong idea about how art is made. Frank Frazetta famously used a Disney-branded set of watercolors for many of his dark fantasy illustrations. Supposedly, he simply liked the colors and wasn’t too bothered about their pedestrian quality. Simply put, it’s not the tools, it’s the talent. Getting the same kind of watercolors as Frank Frazetta isn’t going to make you an artist of his caliber. That’s not how that works.
Do I need to use the same tools as Aubrey Beardsley? No, but I wanted to try something different. When it comes to getting the ink onto the paper, my go-to means has been the trusty, old-fashioned Sharpie permanent marker. Even my favorite pens are Sharpies. They flow well and play nice with most papers. They don’t have the problem I tend to have with ballpoints of getting ugly globs of ink where I don’t want them to be or failing to deliver a consistent line. Obviously, Sharpies didn’t exist in Beardsley’s time. Even ballpoints as we know them wouldn’t come to market until after his death. Though the original patent for the ballpoint dates to 1888, commercial viability was slow-going and wouldn’t really pick up speed until around 1938. That leaves Beardsley with fountain pens, as well as their predecessors dip pens and even the feather quill. I’ve tried my hand at dip pens and found they’re not for me, and I certainly have no desire to try my hand at quills.
I had a fountain pen some years ago, but I don’t know what happened to it. It was something unbranded I got from a hobby shop and didn’t come with instructions, leaving me to try and guess how it worked. I had some ink left over from my dip pens, but it turned out to be the wrong kind of ink and I had no way of knowing. Fortunately, there’s now no shortage of tutorials and I even discovered there’s such a thing as disposable fountain pens so you can give them a try before committing to something a little pricier.
This is my current arsenal of fountain pens, not counting the handful of disposables.
Starting in the center is the Desk pen by Pilot in an Extra Fine sized nib. Ironically, despite its outwardly fancy appearance, it’s actually the cheapest of the pens at about 15USD.
To the right are my other two Pilots, with an Explorer at the far right and a Lightive (which is really just an Explorer by another name and for a different market). The Explorer is a Medium nib and came in at just under 32USD. The Lightive is a Fine nib and came in at just under 28USD. I like these pens. They’ve got an unassuming quality to them. By contrast and staying in this price range, Pilot offers a fountain pen called the Metropolitan. The best way I can describe is that it’s exactly what you picture in your mind when you hear the term fountain pen. It’s almost cartoonish in its shape and proportions, like you can’t hold it unless you’ve donned a pair of white gloves with only four fingers and have a collection of wooden mallets you can call into existence should the need for a good bashing in of something arise. At the risk of sounding like I’m putting it down, it’s the pen you get someone as a graduation present when you don’t actually know what to get them. To its credit, it looks like a million bucks and you’ll certainly feel fancy enough using it… until you realize that its ergonomics are more for style than substance. Well, at the very least, it looks nice on a desk.
It’s worth noting here that nib sizes are not exactly standardized across the board and will vary greatly from manufacturer to manufacturer. Pilot is a Japanese company and this means their nib sizes tend to run a little on the small side. This is because the Japanese have a writing system called Kanji, which are borrowed Chinese characters. They’re a very efficient means of conveying information as each one can represent a syllable, an entire word, or even a short phrase. On top of that, because of their Chinese origin, many have two different meanings and you have to deduce which one is right by context clues. The downside to this (besides some humorous mistranslations based on misreading Kanji) is that the characters are often very dense and elaborate and may not always fit in most ruled lines of paper. As such, the Medium nib on the Explorer is actually quite thin and the Extra Fine of the Desk pen is almost invisible if the page is held at arm’s length.
On the other side of the Desk pen are a pair of pens from a German company called Kaweco. The first, to the immediate left of the center is a Perkeo with a Medium sized nib. This is a special edition one offered by Moleskine, the notebook company. At 36USD, it’s the most expensive pen out of them all, and that’s mostly because of having the Moleskine name stamped on it as well as coming in a color that matches some of Moleskine’s sketchbook covers. Typically, Perkeos come in at around 20USD and are generally marketed as the beginner model. They’re fairly large and the grip section has a triangular shape to help you position your fingers correctly as you write. It’s my least favorite pen of the group, and that’s mostly because I kind of bought it by mistake. Specifically, I mistook it for another type of pen Kaweco makes called the Sport. Moleskine didn’t call the pen a Perkeo on their website and I was therefore none the wiser. Kaweco likes to market their pens as pocketable. To this end, their pens don’t have clips, relying instead on their octagonal design to keep from rolling off a desk. Clips are available as a separate accessory. I bought one, found it didn’t fit, and did some research into Kaweco’s lineup to get the full story. So, I was left with a pen with no clip and a clip I couldn’t use. The solution seemed obvious… I had to get a Kaweco Sport.
That leaves the Kaweco Sport on the far left. It has an Extra Fine nib and has been my favorite pen to take with me places. When I take it to work, it gets clipped under the button of my polo shirt’s collar. It’s very fun to use because of its size and has some surprisingly good ergonomics to it when it’s posted (when the cap is put on the back end). Without its cap, it’s about the length of a golf pencil, which I simply find funny.
Not pictured is a black Kaweco Liliput with a Fine sized nib. That’s on the way. I found a really good deal on it. Normally, these metal pens retail for about 70USD, but I found one for just shy of 40USD. It’s sleeker and more compact than the Sport, and will probably live permanently in one of my bags. Haven’t decided if I want a clip for it or not. It would certainly be practical, but might disrupt its sleek, bullet-like form.
Okay, you may well be asking, why six pens? Besides their different forms lending them to different uses, they all have different sized nibs from each other, and that’s important for making lines of different weights. The Perkeo’s Medium nib is drastically different from the Explorer’s Medium at almost three times the width. In fact, I’ve got Sharpie markers that can make a finer line than the Perkeo. I think Moleskine made a bit of a mistake in offering a Medium-nibbed pen as their co-branded offering; on a typical Moleskine notebook, the pen puts down far too much ink, not only to the point of bleeding through to the other side of the page, but possibly onto the very next page if you’re not quick enough. It’ll do fine on my Mixed Media paper and some of my more robust Moleskine sketchbooks, but not recommended for casual journaling on thin paper. The Sport’s Extra Fine works very well on my notebooks, though there can be a little bit of bleed-through when compared to my trusty Sharpie pens.
You may also have noticed that, with the exception of the Desk and inbound Liliput, all of these pens are blue.
The reason for that is simple. I like blue. It’s my favorite color. There was no blue option for the Desk, only black and an elegantly deep red. The Liliput similarly offered a black with its only blue offering being a shade far too light for my tastes (and wasn’t for the same price and I didn't even find it until after I'd made the purchase). Besides, the thing I like best about the Liliput is how sleek, discrete, and inconsequential it looks. The Explorer is about as light as I like my blues to be.
This brings us to Lamy, a German company with a long and rich history of fountain pens. I don’t have any Lamy pens, but I’ve had my eye on some. The Sport is nice and so is the Explorer, but I want something a little more special. Lamy offers a pen called an AL-star, the AL standing for Aluminum. They go for just under 40USD and come in a variety of colors, including a deep blue number they creatively call Ocean Blue. It’s nice, but I feel it’s missing something. The metallic body is blue, but its translucent plastic grip section (hidden by the cap) is a smokey black.
It’s fine, but I don’t love it.
The solution is only slightly more convoluted than buying a pen to justify buying a clip, and that’s the other colors of Lamy AL-stars. The plan that’s percolating (though may well never actually come to fruition) is to buy two pens and Frankenstein them together to make a singularly perfect pen. To help me with this decision making process, I’ve made an infographic.
A. Ocean Blue. This one’s straightforward enough and will be the foundation. As I said, it’s a nice shade of metallic blue, but has an uninspired grip section.
B. Denim. A lighter, almost powder blue body ending with a bright orange grip section. This one caught my eye because orange pairs nicely with blue as a contrast. They complement each other.
C. Disco. Why they didn’t call this Watermelon I will never know. It’s a pale green with a deep pink grip section. Speaking of pink…
D. Roller Skate. I’d have called it Bubblegum, but I think I get the vibe they’re going for. It’s got a pink body with a nice blue grip section. Combining this with the Ocean Blue would make for an all blue pen. It’s appealing, but lacks a bit of personality. Speaking of Bubblegum…
The reason for Disco’s inclusion in the list may not seem as obvious as orange’s pop or blue’s uniformity, but pink and blue is, I think, a rather underrated color combination. Pink tends to evoke many strong feelings from people, mostly negative. Some will say it’s simply not a cool color, to which I say, “The Pink Panther is the coolest cat there is and you’re all objectively wrong for believing otherwise.” Speaking of animation, there’s an anime series called Bubblegum Crisis. It’s a fairly standard offering from the medium, featuring a group of women donning powered armor to fight monsters in a cyberpunk future. As I understand it, this is one of those shows that wasn’t actually a big hit in Japan but exploded when it came to English-speaking markets (Pickings were slim, and you could certainly do a lot worse).
One of the characters is named Nene, and her armor (called a Hardsuit) stands out from her compatriots by being a deep blue with bright pink legs, whereas the rest are a singular color with sparse highlights. This would be changed in a later series to red and pink, which I don’t think looks as striking as the original, more like the Hardsuit faded in the wash.
Anyway, here’s Blue with Orange and Blue with Pink.
The obvious problem with this strategy is I’m left with a pen I really want and one I don’t. Maybe I can sell it on eBay and claim it’s an especially limited edition, literally one of a kind. Maybe it’s someone else’s perfect pen.
