Which inking pens/brushes are your favorites?

Question

I'm looking into buying some higher quality inking pens and brushes for cleaning up drawings. I'm thinking about starting a drawing journal that is going to last and whose pages I might eventually scan. So a dependable pen would be great!

I would love to hear any recommendations for pens that you rely on and what use you get out of them.

Also, I've been looking into a gift box of Faber-Castell PITT brush pens - anyone have any experience with this mark?

Answer 1

After years of using drawing nibs, techical drawing pens like Rapidograph, and black ink brush drawings, I've finally settled on plain, old Sharpie brand laundry markers, both medium and fine point for, virtually, all my ink on paper jobs.

If not the Sharpies, I create drawings entirely in my computer using Adobe Illustrator's vector based drawing tools, or, by digital drawing pad and the freehand tools of Illustrator or Photoshop.

May not be the kind of answer you were looking for, but, as a freelance designer, time really DOES equal money, and, the simpler or more efficiant the tool, the better.

I had a set of those brush pens, and they had a NICE texture and feel to them. The ability to vary a line thickness felt very natural, and mimicked the variability of a good drawing pen nib, but with BIG, bold lines. But, I found the limited color selection very stifling and I did most of my color work, before going digital, with some very good artist's color markers. The color selection was huge, and I had as many as a couple of hundred of these pens at any one time.