 Hi there, it's Sandy Alnok and today I'm going to talk about nib sizes for inking because I just bought some new pens! Yeah, I know I'm kind of a junkie for pens. Rotering isograph. I used to have technical pens when I was in college and I haven't had them since then. This set comes with a pencil that has leads in an eraser with it and three of the technical pens and a bottle of ink. There's three different sizes of these and I'll talk a little bit about what makes these different from all the fountain pens that I always have been using of late and compare them with things like Sharpies and Microns. First though is my favorite pen, my Visconti Mirage, not just because it's got a yellow body to it but it's a dream to draw with but it's ridiculously expensive so I'm not going to tell anybody to go get that one. The Twizby Eco though is what I recommend. I love these pens, I love how they write, I love the clear body so you can see how much ink is in them. There's just a lot of things about them for being a really reasonably priced pen that I think is really well worth recommending but the extra fine Twizby Eco is thicker than my Visconti Fine. Amazing. So even the fine of the Twizby Eco is thicker still and then the medium is thicker still so fine in one brand is not fine in another, not meaning it's not good but it's just not the same weight everywhere. The Rotring Isograph, these pens are, they're okay. I had a different brand when I was in college, I had the Koh-I-Noor's, I think they were higher quality than these but these are decent, it's an expensive set but they're not bad pens, the caps don't stay on really well but you can replace the nibs and you can replace the ink inside them so they do have an ink well, you just need a dropper to put it in and they have these really fine widths though, look how skinny those are. There's sometimes when I need that kind of a thin nib, there's just something that it does that nothing else does but you can see the difference in how thick a sharpie is compared to that and then I'm going to run through a bunch of microns. Now the sharpie and the microns are not refillable and you can't replace nibs and things on those but they're more affordable. So if you're looking for a variety of sizes then the microns getting one of those sets with a bunch of them would be helpful or just, you know, use a sharpie. If that's what you can afford then draw with that. Do not stress out about trying to get something fancy. But I wanted to be able to at least show you this because some people might want a thinner nib for things from time to time. So I also am doing a little comparison here. The line weights, try to find something that approaches the Visconti Mirage, probably the Isograph 0.3 maybe, it's close, it's not right there but it's close. The Twizbeco extra fine, you could probably substitute for that a micron in the 0.3 size and then the fine in the Twizbeco is probably about the same weight as the Isograph 5.0 or 0.50 and I don't know why anybody does these numbers because they don't mean anything compared to anybody else's numbers. They all use their own systems and so it is what it is but the medium in the Twizbeco is equated to both the Sharpie Ultra Fine and the Micron 0.5. 0.05, 0.5, I don't know, sometimes they have a point, sometimes they don't. I don't understand all this, too much math. But the Rosetring Isograph, if you like that pen but you really don't want to invest in crazy pens like that, you can get a Micron in the 005. That's about the same width and the Micron 005, I don't know if you can get it single, I'll look it up and see if I can find a link for you in the supplies. But you can get it in a set, I know that. But in a drawing, why would you want more than one size of pen? Generally, all my drawings, I just pick a pen and I do the whole drawing with the pen. But you'll see I've got a class coming up and I'll show you a little sneak peek of that. There are times when you might want a thinner line, so I decided to draw this little mouse because he's kind of got some different aspects to him that I could show you why one pen might be helpful to have compared to another pen. So in this one I'm going to start off with using the medium nib, just big old honking nib and do some shadows on my mouse and just do the dark parts first. Don't always do the dark parts first, sometimes I do the dark parts later, whatever. And then I'm going to fill in with a fine nib to try to create more of that fur look for my little mouse and you can see there's definitely a difference in the width, a difference in the quality of detail that you can get into it based on what you're drawing. It's also dependent on what size you draw. If you like to draw really tiny and you've got a little tiny sketchbook, then you're going to want smaller pens. If you draw really big, you don't want tiny pens because it'll take you a year to get a drawing done if it's really big. But having a variety of them in your studio kind of gives you some options if you want to try different things and I'm always trying different things and given that Inktober is on the way in just a couple of days, then yeah, I'm going to be doing a lot of drawing. So here is where that little isograph comes in. Look how tiny that line is. I can do a whole lot of lines with that isograph and put a lot of texture in that mouse's chin and still not meet up with the darkness that's in the rest of the mouse's fur. That I can't achieve with a fountain pen. So I needed something else. Now these technical pens, the nibs on them are fragile. If you drop one, you could break the nib and bend it. And I did that in college a lot. I replaced a lot of nibs. I remember trying to save money so I could buy a new nib for my pen for my drawing class. But you do have to be a little careful with them, but they're fixable. You can get new nibs. You can put new ink in them. Microns, you can't replace the ink, but they're more affordable. So it really depends on you and what you want and how often you use it, all that sort of thing. Microns and Sharpies also, over time as they run out of ink, they make lighter lines because they don't put out as much ink. So I save old Sharpies to do some of the fine details because they're not as thick. They don't put down as much ink. So sometimes having an old crappy Sharpie around is helpful as well. So now on to the class that is live and available for you, Ink Sketching Techniques. This is the project we're doing and it's going to be in a accordion notebook. I did one of these recently on YouTube and I had so many people say, teach us how to do that. So I decided to do it. We've got castles. We've got cottages. We've got a bridge and a mouse and a tree and all different kinds of things. So there's lots of fun to be had in that. I'll be teaching you some skills that you can learn to go make your own drawings after this because I never want you to just make my project and then stop. I want to give you skills that you can go do other stuff with. So it's going to be a fun class. I hope you will enjoy it. If you are a person who likes to do pen and ink work, it is an intermediate class. So there you have it. That's about it for today. I think I'm going to go now. I will see you guys in the near future with another video because that's how I roll. I keep making more videos. Take care. Go make art. See you later. Bye.