Lamy fountain pen review

Ok….got excited. Over a new pen. A new lamy fountain pen.

Now I know that’s pretty sad, but let me explain.

If you take a look at many of my more looser illustrations like this…

Then you’ll see that they’re pen and ink with watercolour over the top.
Yep, Quentin Blake influence. Though not as much as you might think! When I was first married to the delightful Mrs Gray, I dreamed of being a cartoonist illustrator. Not a pipe dream either. Now my style evolved quite nicely…but nothing came of it because I didn’t have the right links. And besides which, I don’t think it’s what God wanted!

Still, later on I got to illustrate a few books and so on.

That said, that looser style originally got lost along the way and became pretty tight, the kind which is more like this

…which I am working on for a friend. But still I rather prefer the looser style. So what became of it?

About 6 years ago I got a rather fun book published by Klutz, drawing for the artistically undiscovered (affiliate link)

For most people, such a book is a) for kids and b) not worthy of artists anyway.

Fools!

This for me was a treasure trove of brilliant ideas and approaches. Where else could you have someone but Blake write that you could spend years painting the perfect picture of a rabbit, only to miss what it is entirely, yet in a few short scribbles capture the essential rabbit- ness.

You even get to draw in the book. Marvelous.

I worked through the book , and as I did so my drawings recaptured the style I was naturally discovering some 20 years earlier, but now I also had a good few years under my belt in more formal art techniques, and illustration. But now, rather than being somewhat locked up, my pictures took on, to my mind, a certain freshness, spontaneity and fun.

People who saw my pictures thought the same, and still do. (For example, I was rather thrilled recently when a friend took a picture I had scribbled of her family on an envelope just for fun to make them smile and made it her Facebook profile! Kinda makes it all worth it!)

So yes, unashamedly a little Quentinesque! But not copies….

So what’s this about a new pen?

The style I do now I like to just get things down in ink. Maybe some crude circles and lines to place figures, and that’s it. The ink has to be waterproof because over this goes watercolour.

You can’t put pigment down first because it just clogs the nibs, even of dip pens, or else it doesn’t sit right on the ground. However, dip pens aren’t overly my preference. Mr Blake loves them as they blot their way through life, but I never fine they flow, or work at a consistent size. Then I find a nib which is perfect, only to lose it next time.

I actually prefer fountain pen. But alas! All fountain pen ink goes mushy in water. Besides which, I can’t take dip pens into the field.

Then I read about fount India…Pelikan make this ink which goes into fountain pens but is water resistant. A apparently though, it still runs a little. But there is another alternative, platinum carbon ink. It does risk clogging but they recon if you use the pen daily you should be fine. Pelikan reccomend a flush after every use, so with the carbon ink at least it’ll force me to draw every day.

All my current fountain pens are cartridge, what I really needed was a good old fashioned reservoir pen…plunger DIY fill. Used to be that that was all you could buy. When Mr Perkins of Newburgh school insisted that we use fountain pens that the school actually bought for us, there was a constant stream of kids getting inky fingers. You could convert them to cartridge pens.

Now it’s the other way around, you need converters for cartridge! Trickier to get hold of though. Not sure what works for what…

So I went into the posh pen shop in Manchester Trafford centre, and the very helpful assistant told me there was a cheap pen (available also from whsmith I note) and I could buy the converter!

Just under £20 and 15minutes later I walked out with this pen

With a converter!

The pics behind are copies of Blake pictures I did tonight off the web just to try it out, hence why I was using the also included blue cartridge. Gotta wait till pay day to buy the carbon ink!

I like my cheap cartridge pens, but I like this pen even more. An expressive nib, not too flexible. Leave it in one spot and it pools quite nicely, and allows a bit of noodling. Thins out on a quicker stroke, but feels just the right kind of smoothness.

Angle it up and it digs nicely into the paper which creates a sharper angle. Nice little pool points at the ends of lines and sudden changes of direction.

I quite like turning the nib over and carefully, because you can bust nibs otherwise, using it like a technical pen. It gives a very fine but very consistent line, no pooling or anything.

I like the see through thing too.

Can’t wait to get the new ink. I might just get the in laws watercolours finished too in which case!