purple ink

Colors Review: Staedtler Triplus Fineliner, Porous Point, 6-Color Set

by Andrew

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As an instrument for writing, I wasn’t particularly fond of the Staedtler Triplus Fineliner’s barrel shape, a unique design that resembles a rounded-off triangle. But for drawing and coloring, this design seems to work pretty well. Almost like a grip, the flat edges allow for a little more control, whereas fully rounded and smooth barrels can sometimes slip in your hand.

This six-color set, is fairly standard in terms of color variation, so they could work well for utilitarian tasks like taking notes and editing papers. However, these pens are also very good at filling in areas and creating clean lines, so I’m inclined recommend them for more artistic purposes.

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It’s also worth mentioning that Triplus Fineliners are “dry safe,” which means that you don’t have to worry too much about capping and uncapping these pens – they take days to dry out. So, if you’re working on something especially detailed, it will save you an extra step when going back and forth between colors.

But no matter what you might use them for, they are really a quality set of pens. In fact, I might have to look into adding a few more colors to my collection.

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Note: that alien looks a lot more menacing than I intended.

 

Colors Review: Pentel R.S.V.P. Eight-Color Set, 1.0mm Ballpoint 

by Andrew

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The Pentel R.S.V.P. is a pen that’s ubiquitous to the school-supply isle. It’s nicer than the cheapo pens you’ll find in the typical office supply cabinet, but it’s inexpensive enough – and durable enough – that you could probably throw it into a kid’s backpack without much thought. This eight-color set of Pentel R.S.V.P. ballpoints follows along those same lines; they work, but there’s little that’s noteworthy.

The colors included here all feel fairly basic. The blue, red, purple, and green lend themselves best to utilitarian tasks like grading papers or taking notes. The orange, light blue, and pink are a bit brighter, but still might be best suited to highlight or mark passages in a book. Drawing, doodling, or coloring is best treated as an after-thought.

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These R.S.V.P. colors don’t provide a particularly smooth or smear-free writing/drawing experience. Color with them too long and you’re bound to find ink blobs smeared across the side of your hand. And despite the soft grip section, hand-cramps are likely to occur after only a few minutes of continual use. Like most ballpoint pens, the ink works great for shading and darkening (depending on how hard you press down on the paper), but they don’t fill in areas particularly well either.

These pens are best put to work in a calendar, textbook, or notebook – anywhere drawing, doodling, or coloring will be secondary.

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Colors Review: Pilot B2P, Gel Ink, 5-Color Set (0.7mm)

by Andrew

The Pilot B2P gel pen has been one of the more popular reviews on this blog, and that doesn’t come a surprise. The B2P is cleverly marketed as an eco-friendly pen, and it has a unique look that is supposed to resemble a plastic (and recycled) water bottle. It’s a pen which calls to you from the store shelf, begging you to try something that’s a little different (even though it uses the same ink as the most popular gel pen on the market, the Pilot G-2).

Even though the colors in this B2P set don’t really resemble water bottles, they still have a unique look to them.The barrels of the pink and light green pens, in particular, look almost luminescent when light passes through them.

As for the ink colors, I like the light green and the blue (which is also a lighter shade), and the pink has a nice brightness to it. Overall, however, these colors come across as somewhat generic. It would have been neat to see a theme for the B2P colors, similar to what Pilot did with the G-2 Mosaic Collection. They could have done five colors of the ocean, perhaps.

Consider purchasing this pen set only if you like the look of the colorful barrels. They are surprisingly comfortable to hold, despite not having a grip, and they feel fairly sturdy for pens entirely composed of plastic. And luckily, the cartridges are easy to swap out. In fact, I might end up just throwing some standard black ink inside these pens.

Colors Review: Zebra Sarasa, Gel Ink, Ten Assorted Colors

by Andrew

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When I reviewed the standard black Zebra Sarasa, I called it a pen that failed to stand out alongside a sea of similar options, and I felt very similar when I cracked open this 10-pack of Sarasa colors. Included in the pack is a black pen plus three shades of blue, two shades of green, a red, a pink, a violet, and a brown. Oddly, orange and yellow – standard colors in larger sets – are absent.

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I quite like the aquatic hue of the light blue and the reddish tinge of the brown, but none of the other colors stand out as anything special. The pens are relatively comfortable to hold, and the ink is relatively smooth. The Zebra website also touts its “rapid dry ink technology,” though the pens still manage to smear somewhat.

If you already have a stash of colored gel-ink pens, you aren’t likely to find much new here. However, these will do fine as a standard set of color pens. At the very least, that brown ink will look good in my notebooks.

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Colors Review: Pilot G-2 Metallics (Green and Purple)

by Andrew

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I wasn’t expecting to review another set of Pilot G-2 Metallics so soon, but I liked the blue/silver pack and the pink/gold pack enough that I knew I had to grab this green and purple set when I saw it on the store shelf. Like the other Metallics colors, it uses the Pilot G-2 design, but has an ink infused with some sort of magical metallic pigment. This gives it a sheen that makes it pop out more than a traditional gel ink color.

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While both the green and the purple have that characteristic metallic shine, neither seems to stand out quite like the other colors I’ve tried. The purple also turned out to be a darker than I expected, which almost makes it better for writing than for drawing. However, it’s worth mentioning that all of these metallic colors seem to smear fairly heavily.

Overall, the green and purple colors are good additions to the G-2 Metallics line, but they are probably my least favorite of the bunch. Regardless, I’m happy to see Pilot adding more colors (and I’m still hoping to see a metallic dark red).

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This Doodle inspired by Rich Davis