Letters by Lydia: All About Brush Pens

Welcome back everyone! Hopefully you all enjoyed the holiday break and are settling into the new semester smoothly 🙂

Today we’re gonna take a bit of a deep dive into brush pens. I’ve talked about them a lot before, but I’ve never fully gone into all the different types and variations, so let’s get into it!

First and foremost, there are three major materials brush pens can be made from: hair or bristles, felt, and plastic.

For beginners, felt or plastic is definitely the way to go–these are firmer, less flexible, and generally easier to work with.  Personally, I prefer plastic nibs, because they don’t really fray, they last a long time, and they’re usually a bit juicier.  The one I have pictured above is unusually large and clunky–usually these are small and very easy to work with. Felt tips are probably the most common, but they fray pretty quickly if you don’t use a certain kind of paper, and dry out more easily than plastic. Brush pens with bristles are the most difficult to handle, as they’re the most flexible.  That said, if you’re good at it, you can get incredibly results with these.

From there, size is the other important factor to consider, and it kind of goes hand in hand with elasticity.  Brush pens that are more elastic will be more flexible, which means you can get thicker strokes with them in addition to the thin strokes.  Below you can see some different types of brush pens, from super small and firm–you may recognize the monami plus pen 3000 here, which I reviewed a while ago–to really big and flexible.

In terms of major categories, there’s essentially just super small pens (as in, monami plus size), medium sized (I don’t have a lot of these, but the faber-castell is probably the closest bet), and then large (ecoline, marvy uchida, tombow, and karin are all good examples of this).  Hopefully you found this interesting and learned a bit about brush pens, and have a lovely first week of classes!