Art supply question? please help.?

Question

I'm looking for a good high quality drawing pen with a very fine tip. I don't want sharpies or kids makers. I want something that i can use for detail. I like to draw alot, but the pens i use bleed into the paper. Oh, and can you also reccomend a good type of paper to use it on? I normally use a sketch book but it doesn't work very well with what i'm drawing. Any suggestions? Anything will help.

Thanks

Answer 1

I love technical pens but they always clog. They have sizes .5 .05 and .005 which are all very fine lines. I found in the pen section of the art store a wide selection of fine tip DISPOSABLE 'technical' pens, in the .5 and .05 sizes for $2 each and got a good handful. They don't run out of ink very fast, are easy to work with, waterproof (do a line on paper then wet your finger and see if it smudges), and they work with most papers that don't have a 'lumpy' surface.

I've used them on computer paper and hot press art papers, they're good ones! Micron makes good pens that go to finer lines, but there never seems to be much ink in those, they run out fast and are $5 each.

The ones I've used are these:
Itoya pigmented ink Finepoint System (comes in a .2 which is very thin line, .4 and .6 but the 6 may be too thick for you)

Uni-ball Vision Fine

Pilot Hi-Techpoint V7 Fine

The first two have silver outsids, the last is a black outside. They're all $2 so they're cheap enough. If you want to see what they've been used for, do a google search on Ferret Tarot, I used these pens to do the entire deck.

I'm guilty of using cheap papers when I draw, so I usually test with a few lines to see if the paper bleeds first. Or if the surface has too much fiber that the tip of the pen could catch and pull, making blurred wedges (usually not a problem though).

Answer 2

Zig makes some fantstic technical pens. As for paper, i like to use bristol board.