Happy Wednesday everyone! Today we’re taking a look at what are probably my favorite pens of all time: the Karin Brushmarker Pro.
These are notorious in the handlettering community for being some of the best brush pens out there. Unfortunately, they have the price to match, but we’ll get into that later.
Karin is a Polish company that, as far as I know, literally only makes brushpens. They have three different types, the decobrush, decobrush metallic, and the brushmarker pro. The two types of decobrush are opaque and good for dark surfaces, and the brushmarker pro is their version of your standard brush pen, which what I have. They’re super juicy, pigmented, and high quality. The tips are made of nylon instead of felt or bristles, which makes them extra bouncy and durable. They can fray a bit, but it takes them a lot longer than felt tip pens. For example, when you look below at the swatches I included, you can see that some of the pens can get a finer upstroke than others.
They make 72 colors total, but I only have the small set, which comes with 26 colors (swatches above) and a blender pen. If you don’t know, a blender pen is a colorless pen that is supposed to be used, as you might’ve guessed, for blending different colors together. However, I don’t love the blender pen with this set, because Karin markers are already super juicy and actually blend really well together using water and a paintbrush, no blender pen needed. In my opinion, it also just doesn’t work super well.
The only other major con of this pen set is the price, like I mentioned before. This set of 27 pens is $60, and the set of all 72 colors runs for $153. In my opinion, the quality is well worth it, but that doesn’t change the fact that buying a set of these is a pretty big purchase.
Overall, this is more of a fangirl post as opposed to a legitimate recommendation, because I know most college students aren’t gonna be able to shell out $60 for a few pens (I got these for Christmas a few years ago). But if you ever do get the chance to use them, enjoy!
Before we get into my opinions, let’s introduce these guys. The Monami Plus Pen 3000 (I know, a bit of a ridiculous name) is a fine tip pen. It’s also a felt tip, although I would argue it’s closer to a plastic nib (for felt tips, think Papermate flairs–these are a lot sturdier and skinnier). Even though they have a fine tip, they have enough give to them to act as a pseudo-brushpen if you want them to. I use these more often to color in small things or write, though. You can see some different ways to use these in the picture I included. One thing to note about the ink, though, is that it can be a bit splattery. It’s not juicy enough where it will leak or splatter enough to stain things, though, it’s just worth noting because sometimes it can be hard to get clean lines.
The pen body isn’t my favorite–these guys are really tall and thin, and feel kind of cheaply made, which makes sense because they’re known for being super affordable. They’re also known for coming in a huge color selection, including a lot of pastels, fluorescents, and muted colors. The set of twelve I have is mainly just classic bright colors, but I’m obsessed with the case it comes in–it’s super satisfying to unclasp it for some reason, and it’s super convenient to keep in my bag.
The basics all come down to upstrokes and downstrokes. Upstrokes are thin lines that use just the very tip of the brush pen, and they start from the bottom and go in an upwards direction (as the name implies). Downstrokes, again, what a shocker, start at the top and go in a downward motion. These are thicker lines because they involve using more pressure on the pen. I demonstrated this with the pictures below, using my favorite brush pens, Karin brushmarker pros.
Once you get these basic strokes down, you can start experimenting with more complicated strokes. I’m not sure who originally came up with this set of strokes to practice, but I know I’ve seen @thehappyevercrafter and @ensigninsights use these on Instagram (highly recommend their accounts, especially for beginners!). In any case, these are essentially the core kinds of strokes or lines you’ll need to be comfortable making, because they appear in a lot of letters.
Here’s your basic lower-case, cursive “a”. To make this, you actually have to use two strokes (shown in the picture), meaning you pick up your pen once in between. For the first stroke, the oval-ish shape, you start where I put the little 1 in a circle. From there, you start with an upstroke, then transition into a downstroke, and finish off with another upstroke that connects to the first. Then, you pick up your pen, and begin stroke two! This one is a lot easier–start at the same height as the top of your oval, and just go straight down, then kind of flick your pen back up for that final upstroke. I’m not going to guide you through every letter because we’d be here forever, but I did include a little sheet I drew of all the letters and some guiding arrows for each of the strokes involved. I also color-coded them, so the stroke you start with is in red, followed by a yellow stroke, and on a few letters there’s a third stroke which is in blue. Of course, there are tons of styles for writing the alphabet, and every lettering artist does it a bit different, but this is how I tend to do it!
The tips are flexible, but also incredibly easy to control, which earns them major points. As for durability, these are pretty decent. If you aren’t using paper specifically for handlettering, the tips will fray faster, but that’s true of most pens. As for the colors, they’re beautiful–very pigmented and rich. 
They offer a wide range of colors between all the sets, which you can see even just in the ones I have; there’s the super light pastels all the way to the deep, rich hues. That said, I wish they offered a higher quantity of different colors. For example, they have tons of different blue/green shades, but only one red between all of the sets. The price depends a lot on where you get them and what colors/size you choose, but a set of 6 is about $10-12 and a set of 10 is about $15-20.