Last week I discovered that Jet Pens was selling the Wink of Stella Glitter Brush Pen by Zig / Kuretake of Japan. I love Jet Pens, primarily because I am a pen addict, but also because they have excellent customer service and deliver the product quickly and correctly. I will admit I’ve bought some pens that did not thrill me. (I never warmed up to the cult-favorite Tradio, which to date has left more ink on my fingers than on paper.) But that’s not Jet Pen’s fault. Not every pen will please every client. And I made no effort to return it.
This time I bought two pens that I can recommend highly. The first is a a 3-mm fountain pen with permanent black ink.
Linemarker A.T. 03 (3mm) from Tachikama, purchased from Jet Pens.
In other words, its the fountain pen equivalent of a Pitt Pen. It’s the Linemarker A.T. by Tachikama. It’s about 6 inches long, a plastic cartridge pen for drawing comics. It comes with two cartridges of black ink. The pen has a window so you can check ink supply as you write or draw.
The ink dries fast, is waterproof and doesn’t feather or bleed. The pen puts down a thin, even black line with a steel nib. The only ink color is black, which is what I wanted.
I purchased it for details on hand-lettering and am very pleased. No smudging, no skipping. Just clean, even lines and dots. At $13.50 it’s an excellent buy compared to the technical drawing pens I normally use. And it’s much easier to take care of.
The other pens may be my find of the year. This is the Wink of Stella Glitter Brush Pen by Zig Kuretake.
The brush pen comes in 12 colors and clear.
The pen is a brush, and it comes in 12 colors and clear. The ink in the pen is a rich color mixed with microscopic specks of gold glitter.
Because it is a brush, it is flexible and can write both a fine line and a broad one, which makes it excellent for hand-lettering.
I bought the black pen and the clear one. The black pen puts down a rich, dark line of ink with a super-fine glitter in it. I’m not normally a glitter girl, but this ink is perfect. Neither harsh nor overdone, the color is distributed evenly, goes down smoothly and looks elegant. The pen is also comfortable to hold, with a tapered body and a finger grip that can be squeezed to start the ink flow.
The clear ink is what surprised and delighted me. In the sample on the left, which admittedly doesn’t show the glimmer at all, (you can see samples of all colors here), the clear ink went over a dark green Tombow waterproof ink on the letters L, M, and N.
No smearing, just a snail-trail of sparkly glitter evenly and cleanly put down. The glimmer in the clear pen is multi-colored and the glimmer in the black seems to have more gold tones.
Using the clear brush pen, you can highlight whatever waterproof pen you want to. There is no bleed through and no feathering. You don’t rinse the color out, you simply recap the pen. The glitter brush pen is $6.75 and non-refillable.
These three pens are ones that will become staples for my art journaling and sketching. In the hand-lettered example, the black pen did the thick part of the letters A through K; the clear covered the L through N; the Linemarker made all the fine details; the leaves and flowers were done with a Tombow 280 or a Distress Pen in Victorian Velvet by (Tim Holtz). The Distress Markers are not waterproof, so if you run the brush pen over them, they will smear.
I still have to test the longevity and the ability of the pen to be left uncapped for an hour or so, which is possible in my way of using them.
–-Quinn McDonald is a pen junkie and a pencil addict. Jet Pens knows the way to her house by heart.
QuinnCreative 