Product Review: Getting Loose with the Sailor

9/7/13 Diamine Chocolate Brown ink, Sailor pen, 100 lb. paper

Over in the Sketching Forum, we’ve been talking about various fountain pens that can make variable line widths. Most of them are of the flexible variety – a nib springy enough that if you put pressure on it, the nib will respond with a wider line. Noodler’s makes a line of popular, inexpensive flexible-nib pens (I hated mine so much that it ended up on my Bottom 10 list). And the Namiki Falcon is a high-end example.

Anyway, a couple of us on the thread got seduced by GouletPens.com’s video about the Platinum Cool pen – one of few inexpensive pens with a flexible nib – but, unfortunately, neither of us is crazy about it. Although it’s pleasant to write with, I find that I have to apply so much pressure on the nib to get a wider line that I can’t draw with it. As an afterthought to the complaint, I started talking about how I’ve grown to love my Sailor fountain pens with the angled “ski jump” nib, and I realized I hadn’t written a review of them yet.

I’ve had a Sailor DE Brush Stroke Style Calligraphy Fountain Pen for several months now, and I’m very fond of its basic performance – comfortable in the hand, smooth nib, no rough starts, no leaks or blobs – so much so that I bought a second one with a different angle. I keep both filled with water-soluble inks, and they have become my pens of choice for monochrome sketches shaded with a waterbrush. They make especially sensitive lines when sketching people.

(By the way, the term “calligraphy” in its name is confusing and unfortunate. The term refers to Asian calligraphy, not western italic calligraphy.)

But I admit that for most of the time I’ve owned them, I usually forgot to take advantage of the angled nib that enables variable line widths and mainly used the tip the way a conventional nib is used. It’s only been in the past couple months that I have been consciously attempting to make more expressive sketches by varying the line width.

This tree I sketched at Marymoor Park is a good example (I posted it a few days ago, but I thought I’d show it larger here). If I had used one of my Lamy pens (which I still prefer for permanent ink lines before applying watercolors), I know this tree would not have come out the same, because I would have had to hatch it to get the dark areas. But the Sailor enables laying down thick lines in a hurry, so it encourages me to be looser. In this case, I was also trying to emulate (not always successfully) the way tree limbs taper off toward the end by laying down a thicker line at the trunk and then lifting it more toward the end of the stroke. Then I just scribbled a bit with a waterbrush for shading.

The more I use it, the more I like it, so I think my exploration of this pen is just beginning.

Updated reviews as my love affair with the Sailor has turned into a long-term relationship:

6/16/14 Pen Update: Still Dancing with the Sailor
7/24/14 A Waterproof Dance with the Sailor (using the Sailor with Platinum Carbon Black ink)
7/29/14 Product Review: Sailor Profit Fude De Mannen Fountain Pen (which has an identical nib as the Sailor calligraphy pen reviewed here)