Pentel Brush Pen - A lovely addition to my Sketch Kit
A wonderfully expressive pen, that has been great for sketching and silhouettes
The Pentel Brush pen is a pen I don’t think I really needed, but, once I’d seen it used/reviewed by a few people online, I thought it would be a lot of fun and useful to add to my sketching kit. I wasn’t wrong. It is a great little pen, and so much fun for trees and silhouettes.
Swatches of the types of marks the brush pen makes
Here is just a quick swatch page to show the sorts of marks it can make (please excuse the lettering, I am not a calligrapher). The paper is textured 100% handmade cotton paper, so you’ll see some unevenness as a result of that.
Pentel brush pen swatches on 5x7inch recycled cotton paper
The pen is surprisingly versatile in terms of the range of marks it can make. The tip is super fine, and you can get some really fine lines with practice and control. You can also get some good thick lines, and interesting variation if you like variety in your strokes.
Some pen and ink exercises with the Pentel Brush pen.
Like any material, if you are looking for a very specific effect, or a very thin line, it will take some control and practice to achieve it consistently. If however you're happy with a looser style, this could be a lot of fun to just play around with and see what results you get.
Note however, that depending on the paper, you will see the dry brush marks that are visible in the above swatches where the ink flow was a bit broken. I did not see this issue on the Seawhite of Brighton postcard or the Global Art Materials sketchbook (see sketches below), but bear in mind that you may see that dry brush effect.
If you’d like a more comprehensive review with more trials on different paper, Teoh Yi Chie’s post is great. He also has done reviews of many other brush pens.
Some Sketches
When I bought the pen, I thought I would use it a lot straightaway but it took a little time for me to work out how it would fit into my kit. For a long time, I'd really only used it for this sketch of the branches of the Whirly Whirly tree on Christmas Island in October 2020.
Whirly Whirly Tree sketch, Christmas Island. Pentel Brush pen in Milini Watercolour journal.
After about 10 months of getting it, I finally did use it for trees again for the sketch below while we were in the Ikara-Flinders Ranges National Park inJuly 2021. The sketch was done on the Seawhite of Brighton watercolour postcard, which has a more typical cold-pressed paper texture.
Pentel Brush pen sketch on Seawhite of Brighton watercolour postcard stuck into my Seawhite of Brighton sketchbook.
I’d tried a similar sketch with the Sailor 55 degree pen but I find a pen without the brush tip is really not that intuitive (or easy to use) when trying to do silhouettes like these (for me at least).
In a much more free way, I’d used the Pentel Brush Pen for quick bird sketches while we were out and about one day on Christmas Island last year.
Quick Bird flight sketches in Global Art Materials watercolour sketchbook (200gsm).
It was a lot of fun sketching silhouettes of various birds in flight while on the walk - Bosun birds (Tropicbirds) with their long tails featured heavily.
The pen itself is a really good size and weight, and I love the brush tip on this. I wish they sold a pen with this brush tip that was a refillable brush pen.
More silhouette sketches of birds in flight - tiny little birds flitting about, bosun birds with their long tails, and Frigatebirds with their forked tails.
Waterproof
It is a waterproof pen, but if you’ve used a lot of ink (as I had for the night-time tree sketch), you will have to wait for it to dry before going in with watercolour.
The black ink is really nice, and is that satisfying deep, dark, inky colour that can be hard to replicate in watercolour or gouache.
For sketching, in my opinion it is a much, much better option than the only other one I’ve used (Copic Brush pen). That one is much stiffer, is not a proper brush tip (it is a sponge brush tip) and so the lines it can make are not as expressive, or really that exciting. It is however not bad for things you want more control for, or where shorter brush strokes are helpful. I had a bit of fun with the Copic pen in this little sketch of the New Holland honeyeater.
New Holland Honeyeater - done with the Copic SP multiliner Brush Nib
Not essential, but fun to have nonetheless
For me, my use for this pen is as something a little different in my arsenal, that I sometimes pull out for quick sketches, silhouettes and adding some lettering to my sketchbook pages.
It is not something I use everyday, but I do keep it in my little sketching kit, and it is always a lot of fun to use. This post is a quick overview of some other good waterproof pens for use with watercolour.