Author: splicer

Reg­u­lar read­ers of Mono­chro­mat­ic Out­look will recall that I’ve recent­ly writ­ten a bit about the low­er-end Park­er foun­tain pens that hold such a dear place in my heart. By coin­ci­dence, my stu­dio part­ner asked if I would look at the pen I gave her as a gift a cou­ple of years ago. It has been skip­ping and she’s been hav­ing trou­ble get­ting it start­ed. I wrote recent­ly that every pen I’d ever giv­en as a gift was a Water­man, but … Read the rest

I final­ly got around to writ­ing in the Claire­fontaine note­book I bought back when I start­ed this whole inves­ti­ga­tion into note­books and Mole­sk­ines and all this fun stuff that goes along with hav­ing good pens.

First the com­plaints: it’s ruled too wide. 8mm per line makes me feel like I’m in grade school writ­ing on the paper with the dot­ted lines mark­ing out the x‑height. The blue rules with a sin­gle red mar­gin stripe does­n’t help either. The paper … Read the rest

Worked in the stu­dio today. Hot as blazes here in SF. I’ve been unhap­py with the pen­cils of this draw­ing for a while and sort of stuck in place, unable to move forward.

I think I’ve jarred myself free on this piece. I’m work­ing loose pen sketch­es on vel­lum over the pen­cils. Today’s work showed me where the pen­cils are weak and where they give me enough infor­ma­tion to go ahead into the draw­ing. Instead of a vague sense that … Read the rest

I now have way more paper than I need. I stopped by Arch Sup­plies and picked up the last of the Mole­sk­ine blank books that was not marked «Made in Chi­na». There’s no way for me to run a dou­ble-blind study on myself, so I’m left just with plain ol’ observation.

Prompt­ed by a dis­cus­sion at moleskinerie.com the first thing I did was smell them. A bit odd, but they are reput­ed to have a «musty old book» smell prized … Read the rest

The East­ern por­tion of the Mis­sion Dis­trict and Potrero Hill all the way to the Bay are some­times lumped togeth­er as «the state streets» because many of the North to South streets are named for States in the Union.

What’s not as com­mon­ly known is that when these streets were first laid down, the East to West streets were all named for Cal­i­for­nia coun­ties. I heard a tour guide refer to this when a walk­ing tour came through my neigh­bor­hood and … Read the rest

Okay, I can see the appeal. I’m not sure that I’m ready to join the Mole­sk­ine faith­ful, but these note­books are pret­ty cool. I like the cov­ers, the clo­sure bands are a fea­ture I appre­ci­ate, the end papers are classy and the pock­et in the back is darn handy.

Even the paper-cov­ered cahiers are pret­ty cool. No band, and cer­tain­ly not as durable, but nice. The paper is stitched into the cov­er in a sin­gle sig­na­ture, and the per­fo­rat­ed pages in … Read the rest

It’s no secret that I love pens, so of course I have a lot of oppor­tu­ni­ty to use paper. In my illus­tra­tion I use Strath­more smooth fin­ish Bris­tol. I was taught that I was sup­posed to pre­fer kid fin­ish, but it seems too toothy to me; too easy to tear up. Maybe it’d work out if you’re doing all of your work in brush, but met­al pens tear that stuff to shreds. And I’ve nev­er thought about it that much. … Read the rest

My bot­tle of Auro­ra black is run­ning dan­ger­ous­ly low, so it was time to go ink shop­ping. I don’t know as much about inks as I’d like to, so I’ve been read­ing what I can find online. What I’ve been read­ing are raves from all cor­ners about a brand I was for­mer­ly unaware of: Noodler’s.

Noodler’s is an Amer­i­can com­pa­ny that makes inks for pens. Most foun­tain pen ink brands are pro­duced by pen com­pa­nies. While I don’t deny the … Read the rest