Pentel Arts Color Brush Set with Aquash water brush

Product photo Pentel Arts Color Brush Set in box

I tossed this into my last Blick order on a whim. I had meant to try the Pentel Aquash water brush and see how it stands up to Niji, Sakura and other favorites. It's included in this sketch pens set - so I thought, well, let's see how convenience works. A black, sepia and gray sketch brush prefilled would be handy for sketching.

Wow. I didn't realize how good the Pentel Arts brush would be or how great a point it'd have. The color pens come with cartridges, when they're used up you can get black refills. The gray and sepia only come in sets. Still the set was moderately priced at under $18 at Blick, so it's not that bad for a water brush and three pens. Comparable to other water brushes, certainly.

The color pens unscrew clockwise and screw back on counter-clockwise. This was the case with some water brushes I've had in the past. The Aquash works in the other direction. Get used to it, these things aren't going to be standard in screwing and unscrewing. It's fairly easy to tell if you get it wrong. They come with a little plastic protective collar to keep the cartridge from fully engaging till you unpack it and remove that, which probably keeps the points from getting gunked up before you even use it. I liked that.

The brushes on the color pens are actual brushes with hairs, like a proper water brush. They aren't fiber tip brush tips like the Pitt Pen Big Brush or the Tombow Dual Tip brush tips. They hold a lovely fine point. I got wonderful expressive details with them and did a little lettering on another practice sheet that came out well. 

But their real joy came in the painting!

Painting done with product: shaggy dark goat on a hollow log in a dramatic pose as if it just knocked another goat down.

I had a good photo reference and thought, let's see how these do for illustration. Wow wow wow. Beautiful points. Beautiful expressive strokes. They are very juicy. Before I added the black strokes I had some interesting effects when the gray puddled and lightened in some areas. It handles like watercolor or thin ink, and the pens are good and juicy. I got dry-brush effects sometimes though.

When the brush starts giving dry brush effects, a squeeze on the handle will give more ink. They handle a lot like other water brushes that way. Except that three of these are loaded with color and it's good color. The gray is light enough to stand a second layer to deepen it for another tone, without going to black. So light-dark effects either wet in wet or wet over dry are easy once I got the feel for it.

A black cat painting shows how I got the gray to handle values:

Graveyard Watch, black cat on light tombstone against dark forest

The highlight on the cat's belly was achieved with a second layer on the cat's body, wet over damp. It wasn't completely dry so came up slightly soft edged, while I got deeper darks next to the stark blacks that I put in with the Pentel Pocket Brush pen. The combination of waterproof Pentel Pocket Brush Pen and Pentel Arts Color Brush watersoluble brushes gave me great flexibility in this piece. I got the deepest darks in first and washed over them confidently without breaking any crisp edges, then toned with the gray Pentel Arts Color Brush.

It's very delicate and the ink dries semi-washable. It's not fully dissolved when I run water over it - when it's dried, as the lines were in the brown part of the sawn hollow log, running water over them created only a very light wash. This can be really handy for sketching. Do loose strokes very close together and it will start acting like a wash, color flowing in the direction the paper's slanted. 

They are extremely expressive. How they feel in the hand is a delight. They invite expressive strokes and experimental techniques. I rate these pens five star. They don't have the flat effect that the Tombow ones do, because the color does run lighter or darker depending on moisture. This makes them much more like sumi-e painting (Japanese ink painting) and allows for some gorgeous effects. 

I loosened up using them, but still got as much detail as I wanted in tight areas like the animal's eye or the contour of the ear. 

The brush on the Aquash water brush is excellent, with good flow and a lovely point. I'm sure this will become one of my favorites. Slightly sharper point than the Niji and I like the way the ginger-jar handle shape keeps it from rolling off the desk. It's compact and handy. The one included is a size Medium but they also come in large, small and I think there's also a flat one. Similar to other water brush products in pricing, the handle doesn't have the flow regulator in it so filling is very fast and easy - the regulator's up in the tip.

Urban sketchers should really love these. Throw them into your kit and see what comes out in your journal!

Pentel Pocket Brush Pen

Emu in Pentel Pocket Brush Pen and watercolor

7" square on watercolor journal

Sorry for the long delay in posting. Life happens and I fell behind on a number of things. Today's new product is the best of its kind - with just one caveat.

The Pentel Pocket Brush Pen takes a long learning curve!

I bought this pen three or four months ago. I had enormous trouble controlling it at first. The point is not the same as my Tombow dual tip brush pens or even my Winsor & Newton Watercolour Markers, Pitt Artist Pen brush tips, Pigma Micron brush tips. It's exponentially more sensitive with a much finer tip - and so it's much more sensitive to pressure. Much more likely to flow thick when I want thin or flip off into another direction with an unexpected tremor.

Cat sketches from last May when I first got the pen.

The lines are a lot rougher in the ones I first did with it. I couldn't control them as well and sometimes overcompensated, made the whole line too dark. I started penciling under anything I did with it.

I recommend this pen wholeheartedly. The tip is unlike any other brush pen. It's actually a very fine brush with hairs and the best tip of any round brush I've played with, comparable to the best sable rounds. It has real hairs and the ink is of course proprietary but waterproof, archival and black like the better Pigma Micron brush tips and so on when absolutely new.

It hasn't worn down despite a lot of sketching. The main thing is, don't expect great results on first use. Practice with it. One great exercise is to try lettering freehand with it - do a text in your art journal and don't worry about botched letters or unbalanced ones. I still occasionally get too-thick lines in my monogram signature as I get used to its unparalleled sensitivity.

I bought it because James Gurney recommended it - and thankfully, he mentioned that it was super sensitive and took a while to really learn.

What I didn't realize was that in learning to control this pen, my overall pen work would become so much better. I've spent decades relying on the clean lines of Pigma Microns and Rapidographs, technical pens with a mechanically smooth line. The expressive thick-thin lines are coming into my work more now on this scale now that I've got the Pentel Pocket Brush Pen.

It's about $15 and the cartridge packs are reasonable too. Much more like a fountain pen than the usual disposable brush pen. Of course it'd make a perfect writing instrument for someone using Chinese or Japanese traditional scripts, most brush pens originated as writing pens for Asian calligraphy. But this one really tops the list for fine detail and sensitive control of line.

Educate your hand and invest in one!

Asian Leopard Cat

Pentel Pocket Brush Pen and Watercolor ATC

The Asian Leopard Cat ATC was a breakthrough that made me realize just how powerful this pen can be in my illustrations. I deliberately let myself use very small marks and pointed strokes, made the fur shaggy, used strong marks and light marks deliberately to create the animal's markings without hard edged shapes. The results stunned me. This cat would not have been so natural or illustrative without the perfect point on the Pentel Pocket Brush Pen.

Expressive lines are harder to learn than smooth line work and cross hatching, but once you get it you'll never turn back! i still haven't used up that first cartridge either, done dozens of these drawings and renderings without a skip or a blotch. Letting it sit for a few days capped doesn't make it blob or choke either - as always my supplies rotate and I can go a week or two without using it, then decide I need line work again.

So if you like brush pens, get a Prismacolor or Pigma Micron or Pitt Artist Pen brush tip just to start and then get one of these to upgrade. Keep the thing in your pocket, sketch with it often and don't expcet perfect results until you start getting them. Penciling first so that while inking you concentrate on line control rather than design helps a lot while learning - the Asian Leopard Cat and Emu were penciled first. But now that I'm more used to it, I've begun doing quick cat gestures without penciling again and gotten good results! They will come! Just be patient with yourself and make yourself use it often till they do!

For an easy, introductory brush pen, get a black Tombow Dual Tip for notans and thumbnails, then add a gray or two for value studies. The larger brush tip is a bit more forgiving and will also help you avoid extraneous detail in preliminary drawings. I find I tend to do more detailed drawings if thumbnailing with the Pentel Pocket Brush Pen due to its size and fineness but it fills in black areas well and can create halftone textures by hatching. Thumbnails may become another good practice activity if you hatch your middle tones.

The pen is available at Dick Blick and probably other art supply stores and I got cartridges at Amazon, so that's a convenience.