 Hi there, Sandy Allnock here with a pen review that is not a technical review. I'm not gonna give you measurements and weights, just gonna tell you what I like about the pens I bought. All right, I bought way too many pens in my pen fetish that I've had lately. Too many fountain pens, but you know, I did this for you. That's what I'm telling myself, I did it for you to show you what the good pens are, not good pens. And I've got this fancy box, you do not need a fancy box. A lot of people put them in a drawer, in a little plastic thingy or something. I mean, like you don't need something fancy, but since I had all these, I thought it would be cool to get a fancy case. So I've arranged them in order of price. The two that I took out are like super cheap and the rest of these are really decent pens for drawing with. So let's start with the low end, the Platinum Preppy. And this one is kind of considered a throwaway pen, even though you can replace the ink in that little cartridge. I'll show you in a minute on a different pen, how you can replace it. These come in all different colors. They're great for things like planners or making shopping lists. And you can draw with them, but I don't find them to be particularly great to draw with. They feel a little bit like a big pen in their body because they're just lightweight cheap plastic, but for a fancy feeling pen to write your shopping list with, they're awesome. If you have little kids who wanna feel fancy, this is a great little pen that like 450, I think, up to maybe seven or eight dollars at the max is kind of the price range. So go check those out and see, cause they're fun. The Platinum Prefonte, I don't know if that's how you say it or not, but that one is basically an upgrade to the Platinum Preppy, a little bit nicer, but it's got the same cartridge thingy in it, the same little thing that holds the ink. And this one, you have to drop the ink in with a dropper into that little hole. Imagine me in my crazy, unsteady hands trying to do that. Yeah, that could be a mess. So there you go. It's one of the reasons why I don't like this one. I don't like things that are gonna make a mess on me. And then trying to shove it back in there and get it in just right so that it doesn't leak all over, that's a thing. So some people consider these two pens to be somewhat disposable. And they'll, I know a couple of friends who buy pens for other people just to get them busy drawing. You could put these in a stocking stuffer, that sort of thing, make them as a gift, attach them to a planner. I mean, they're just fun pens, but they're not great, like the pens that I would choose to use for artwork necessarily. But they write okay, they're not great. They don't have the pour that I like from a good pen, by which I mean, I like when the ink really just kind of pours out of the pen so I get a lot of ink on the paper. This Pilot Retropop is kind of fun. It's about a $20-ish pen. And the body is metal, so it feels more substantial. And the bladder on this one is weird, though. It's got this little thing that holds the ink and it's like a plastic or rubber squishy thing. And you can suck the ink out of it like you're using a turkey baster and you can suck ink out of a bottle through the nib and put it in there or you can take this out and put it into there with a dropper. Of course, pop that bubble before you do it. But again, I get messy with pens like this and I don't like messy because it takes me forever to wash all that ink off my hands. So this is not one of my go-tos necessarily, just knowing that it's going to be a challenge for the likes of me to fill the pen. But I've done these little doodles, these little test doodles in this little sketchbook because I wanted to just try each of these pens all at once. I did all the filming in one day so I could remind myself, even though I bought some of these pens a month or two ago, what they all feel like in comparison to each other so I could get to a final recommendation. So this Muji, this one is really a kind of a cool pen. It's in the $20 to $25 range, depending on where you get it. And the body is much thinner than the pens that I like. So that's the only thing that I don't like about that one, but it writes beautifully. The nib is gorgeous on it. It's got a nice little grip on it and I take it with me when I go sketching sometimes. I've added a piston converter to it and I'll talk more about piston converters as we go. It comes with a little cartridge that just pops in there and you can buy replacement cartridges to put in and not have to do any ink bottle stuff with them at all. And it writes nicely, it has good flow to it. It's the body size that you may or may not like. It's really dependent on the person. There's some people that are really particular about how the pen feels in their hand. The Nudler's Ahab Flex I bought because I wanted to try a flex nib and see what the heck that even was. And there are other nibs that I don't even have that eventually I want to try. And you can replace nibs on a lot of these pens but I'm not gonna go to that extent because it scares me, I feel like I'm gonna break something. But this one has a piston built into it and it's a plunger kind of thing. So you push that end in and then put the nib of the pen into the ink bottle and then suck it out like a baster and it sucks it into the body of the pen. So this one does not need a separate kind of ink cartridge or anything or a piston converter to put in it. The flexiness I was not impressed with just because I was expecting more, I think. It's a little flexy but not super flexy. There might be other flex nibs that have a wider variety. And with pens like this, you can press harder and get a thicker line. But I found that I split the two points. There's like two tines on this thing and it would split and then I'd get a white line in there or it would get a little scratchy or whatever. You can also draw with these pens sometimes upside down. Just turn the nib the opposite way and right with it the other direction. There are some pens that do that, some pens you can't tell any difference and some pens just make a mess when you do that. But that flex nib you can write upside down. Pen BBS, this one, they number their pens instead of giving them names. This is a demonstrator pen. All the ones that you can see through are called demonstrator pens. And that means you can demonstrate. There's ink in there. And this one doesn't have much ink in it because I can't figure out how to work the plunger daily. It's got a real special system. I'm not even gonna go into it. I have not been able to function with it. I can get like maybe a quarter inch of ink into it. It's got this really nice big barrel and I can't get enough ink in there. The pen writes nicely, I just can't fill it enough. So I'm not recommending it because I don't know how to fill it. So there's that, right? Now, any of these fountain pens, by the way, if you're going to fill them with fountain pen ink and not with cartridges, you're gonna have to buy a bottle of ink as well. And I'll talk about ink in a little bit here. The Lamy Safari and All-Star pens. The All-Star is a little wider body than the Safari. And as far as I can tell, they're the same pen otherwise. One is just a little bigger in my bronze All-Star. I bought, it was like a, I don't know, anniversary, something, something type of pen. So it was a little fancier, a little more expensive. But I put a Piston Converter in them and these required their own Piston Converters. There's some that are universal ones, some that are special. And I have just got so many Piston Converters now that don't fit anything that I have because I didn't know which one to get. So there's that. Both of these have the similar problem for me. And I know there's tons of people that just they adore these pens, these Lamis. I'm not a big fan of them because I find that they get stuck. And by stuck, I mean when the pen has been sitting in the box for a day or two or three or four and you try to use it again, you have to sort of work with it and jiggle it to get it going. It just doesn't have that automatic flow. I don't have any other pens that do that. And this one also sometimes when you make a long, quick line, it'll skip. So I don't find the flow is good in these pens. They're in the mid-range and I was really surprised that they have this after all the great things I'd heard about the Lamis. When I bought the Allstar and it did that, I thought, well, maybe I'll get the Safari and see if it did and it did it too. So let's talk about my favorites. These next two are my favorites, the Twizby Eco. And again, this is a demonstrator and you can get them with different colored caps on them. And a demonstrator pen is clear so you can see all that ink, see all that delicious ink. It's really easy to fill that much. I wish that other pen would fill that much. But I like this pen enough that I bought two more. The reason I bought two more is because I have a medium and I wanted a fine and an extra fine so I could compare them for you. Yes, I live for you. I'm very nice that way. And it has a wrench that it comes with and tools and stuff because you can fill these by taking that back end off and doing an ink dropper into a nice big open area. It's not a tiny hole like some of those other ones. Or you can do what I'm gonna do, which is to use the little piston suction thingy to make it work. It comes with its own piston system. The nib itself is very pretty. Some of the nibs are not all that pretty and this is one that has a very pretty nib on it. And you can see that the ink would go from the body down into the nib as you use it. Now to fill them, you just put the piston thing down and this is the same for all the piston converters. You just close it up somehow. Stick the nib into the ink, like three quarters of the way up the nib itself so that it kind of is able to suck all that ink through there. And then you open the piston back up and it should suck ink back in. And if it's a good piston then it generally does that really easily. The ink that I'm using here and that I'd recommend if you want a waterproof ink is platinum carbon. I have tons of ink too. I'll do a video someday on inks once I know more about them. But this bottle is like the coolest out of all the bottles. I mean, well, the bottle itself is not the coolest. I have some really beautiful bottles. But this feature is the coolest and I'm thinking I wanna find out how to get more of these for all my other bottles. It has this little insert. And at first I was like, what the heck is a chalice doing in there? A little plastic chalice. And I found a video online that explained it. So what you do with this is instead of getting all the ink stuck in the bottom, which when you get down to just the last little dregs of ink in a bottle, you can't quite get to it with your pen. But with this one, you turn it upside down and then the cup fills with ink. So you don't end up with ink that's useless down in the bottom. So I'm shoving the pen nib down into the ink and then just twisting the piston converter. So I'm just sucking the ink up into the piston. Actually, I was going down first and now I'm going back up and you can see I've got ink in there. I was demonstrating, so I didn't get all the way full. However, that's as easy as it is. And the only ink cleanup that there is is to wipe off the nib that went in there into the bottle itself. And I absolutely love the ones that are easy to fill that don't get ink all over my hands and the Twizby Eco does that. So I'm gonna do my little scribbles with the extra fine, the fine and the medium. If you are going for just one pen, I would definitely say Twizby Eco is a really good starter pen. Like, you know, if you're just looking for one that's gonna be a workhorse, it's gonna do a lot for you. It's got a lot of ink and holds a ton in there. It'll work for a long time. It doesn't seem to get gummed up. I haven't had it had any problems with skipping. It writes right away. And it's in like the $32 range for pens. And so if you're looking for something in that range, that is definitely my recommendation. And that's one of the reasons why I bought three of them because I not only wanted to compare them, but I wanted to make sure that this pen is all that the medium was because I've had this medium for a while and really enjoyed it. It's really fun. I mean, I even just make notes with it, not just drawing with it because I just love the way it writes. So there's that. The Twizby Eco comes with in the little box. It comes with a little diagram. So you can see how to fill it. If you can read Japanese bonus points for you, but the pictures are pretty clear and there's always videos for a lot of these pens and instructions in Japanese and a little paragraph in English. But those are my three recommendation pens. However, this is not my favorite pen. So if I were to just have one pen that could do me, this would be the Visconti Mirage. Now I told you the Twizby Eco is 32. This one is 149. You get fancy things like your initials on the back end of it. They'll give you a little metal chip things that are magnetic and put them on there. And it's really cool. The magnet inside this thing just snaps the cap on so nicely. The body of it is, I guess hexagonal. Not sure how many sides this actually is. Haven't actually counted them, but it's got a good feel to it. The nib is gorgeous and I like pretty things. So a pretty nib is a good thing. And of course I got the yellow one. That was the thing that got me to look at it because I was looking for a yellow pen because that's my favorite color. When posting the cap, which is putting the cap on the back, I always line up the clip on the top of the pen that's right across from where the nib is gonna be. And then that clip doesn't kind of rest on your hand. Makes it more comfortable for drawing. This one comes with a piston converter. So it better for that price for 150 bucks. But it writes beautifully. And if for any reason, any pen doesn't start working if you have to get them started, just take the piston and twist it a little bit and it'll push a little bit of ink into the nib and things will start to work. So now let's talk paper. I have two papers that I wanted to test against each other. This Paris paper for pens and Hanamool's lettering paper because I'd heard about both of them. The Paris paper for pens I'd heard most and I've been using that paper for a lot of drawings and it works fine. And all of a sudden I found this lettering paper. I thought that sounds interesting. So I picked up a tiny pack of it. It's these little mini, little mini packs. So I did the same boxes with each of my fountain pens on both papers. And this was part of my exercise of trying to decide once and for all if I'm gonna tell you what pen to buy. I wanted to be sure I had a good recommendation. I didn't wanna change my mind in a couple of weeks and go, well, you know, I really kind of like this one better. So I did all of this work in one day so I could have this flowing experience of all the pens and know exactly how they felt and what I liked and what I didn't about each one. So this little doodle exercise also taught me a lot about the papers themselves. The papers that you use with pen and ink, with fountain pen, you can of course draw on anything. But some of them are going to be a little more on the absorbent side, which means they're going to feather a little bit. They're gonna bleed just slightly. And some papers are not gonna do that as much. They're gonna be a little more on the smooth and not so absorbent side, but they need to not be so non-absorbent that they float. So there's a really fine line between the two and trying to figure out which papers are perfect. I haven't gotten to that point yet, but that's part of what this whole test was for. And I found that the Paris paper for pens, which you would think would be the perfect paper when it says paper for pens, ended up actually doing more of the fuzzing out than I expected. I didn't realize that it did that much, but I didn't realize it until I tried it against the Hannibal paper. Because it looked really great to me until I compared directly. And that was an interesting thing because it told me how little I actually looked super closely at my work. But if you need a paper that's gonna be super crisp, I would say the Hannibal is gonna be better. I also use a bunch of other different papers too. I'm always testing new fun things and trying every paper that I have with all the different mediums that I have. So, you know, who knows what papers I'm gonna find are great recommendations. I found some bamboo paper that I tried just the other day. And while I don't know enough about it to recommend it, it was really a lot of fun and it got really good line quality for me for the type of drawing that I did. It was a terrible drawing in how it ended up, but so we have the Paris paper for pens, which is a little creamier than the super white of the Hannibal. And the lines you'll be able to see just barely. I'm trying to zoom way in and it's not super clear, but you can see the crispness of the Hannibal lines on the right versus the Paris paper for pens on the left. But I was happy with Paris paper for pens until I got the Hannibal. So everything is in relation to everything else. So put all the pens back in the box. These two are gonna go back in the car and in the purse for shopping notes and that sort of thing. And this box comes also in a single tray instead of a double tray. So for people who are not gonna be a dork and buy 20 pens, then you can get one for just 10 pens or you can just put them in a cup or a drawer and that's just fine. So I did this other drawing on the Hannibal paper and using the Retropop pen. And I did this for Instagram and I actually drew this picture of a penguin. And his name is Wellington and he is the rock hopper penguin or one of the rock hoppers that lives in the Shed Aquarium in Chicago. And I have been watching him throughout quarantine season because since they were closed, they thought it would be fun to let the penguins have a little mental stimulation adventure and let them run around in the aquarium. So they got to meet the other critters and they got to go to the store and they got to go on stairs and they were just walking around all over the place. So if you go to the Shed Aquarium's Instagram or I'm sure they're doing it on their Facebook too but I tend to look more on Instagram, just look up the Shed Aquarium and see if you have little videos of these guys. I'm sure they're also on Twitter. So if you're a Twitter user, just go find them because Wellington's been having a really good time. He's been having a lot of adventures. And one of the things I was hoping, I don't know if this will happen by the time I post this little video on Instagram because at the time I'm doing this voice over I haven't posted it yet. But this little guy I'm gonna hope will be my ticket to get into the Shed Aquarium and like draw some behind the scenes of the penguins. I wanna go to Chicago after everything's over and visit the Shed Aquarium. I love going to aquariums in all different places in the country and drawing. I love drawing the fish and the animals and stuff. There's just something about that that gives me a little excited thrill. So I'm gonna see if they're gonna be nice and maybe let me have a little behind the scenes time with Wellington the penguin. I'm gonna give one little ode to ink, a very short ode when it comes to fountain pens. If you buy a fountain pen and you plan to just buy ink cartridges for it then you don't have to buy any ink bottles. You just buy more cartridges and you're fine. You're good to go. Just pop those in. If you're going to use the testing converters and stuff and suck ink into your pens you're gonna need to get some ink. And I don't know enough about ink to tell you much except for this is the one black ink that I found that's waterproof. Is this carbon black by Platinum? There have been a bunch of them that I've tried that said they were waterproof and then they weren't. I found if you watched my Earth Day video recently that I had some ink in a pen and I thought it was the carbon black from Platinum and it was carbon black from somebody else and it ended up bleeding. So sometimes that just happens but you gotta work with what you got in your pen. There are people who will take all their fountain pens and after they use it they will empty the pen just squeeze all the ink back into the bottle and then rinse it and to clean them you just suck water into the pen, push the water back out, suck it in, push it out using that Piston Converter Dealey and just keep going until it's clear and there are ink cleaners and all kinds of stuff you can use and you can tear apart the pens and all that. I have not gotten to that point because that terrifies me but I have also not gotten to the point of trying to store them empty because I'm using them a lot and if you're using them a lot then that's not usually much of a problem but if you're using a waterproof ink like this it's more likely if you let it sit for a month or two months it's gonna gunk it up. So just know that if you're not gonna use it very often you'll want to empty it and clean it in between uses but I recommend that you just get one and get started and you don't have to get a fancy pen like if you don't wanna get a fountain pen by all means get whatever makes you happy. I have classes on my website that I've taught with Sharpie pens just doodling with a Sharpie pen. You don't have to do anything fancy you can do that on computer paper it really doesn't have to be rocket science just do it. And I've got classes that you can take in learning how to draw in pencil and do shading and do perspective and stuff if that's what you wanna learn but just do it. I have a class that I launched a few months ago that has been kind of one of the best things I think I've done in a while which is 30 days to more confidence, sketching. And in that class I had so many people that started out on day one, day two, day three and they're like oh my gosh this is terrible I'm never gonna get it I'm awful and just blah blah blah and by day 15, 16, 17 they are all of a sudden saying man I can see the improvement I can see I'm getting better. And I'm not saying you have to go take that class but I am saying if you draw every day you will get better it's just going to happen. So don't worry about the first couple of days and if you do something that comes out like poop like my drawing on that bamboo paper don't worry about it like just it's a piece of paper so what you start on a new piece of paper start a new drawing just start. If you wait until you have the right paper or the right pen and the right everything you'll never get there. But for me having really beautiful pens that feel beautiful and paper that just feels like the pen is soaring across it that gets me excited. And then I'm more excited to sit down and draw. So if you're one of those the supplies are linked in the doobly doo down below and you can shop to your heart's content if that's what you need but just do it just do some drawing. Enjoy yourself enjoy the process and you will get better I promise. All right thanks so much for sticking around this long this was a huge crazy video. I will see you again very soon. Bye bye.