Inktober Fountain Brush: Review

This Inktober is, for me, less about the daily art than it is about being able to explore the media, the tools, and expand my repertoire. So I made ink, and I'm testing out new pens. These are not your ordinary pens, though. 

They are super-cool translucent piston-driven cyberpunk pens! Ok, maybe not really. But I have to admit they tickle the inner geek more than a little. 

Fountain brush pen that you have to fill with your own ink.

I bought a three-pack on Amazon last month, in prep for Inktober, and filled one with Noodler's ink (last year's ink exploration that left me loving the colors you can get in ink). The other two I left empty until the day before my birthday trip. I wanted to continue to explore the handmade inks, but definitely did not want to carry glass stoppered ink bottles along on a trip. Fountain pens to the rescue! Almost every blog and article I have seen cautions against using homemade ink in a fountain pen. There's concerns - legitimately so - of clogging, not to mention the possibility of corrosion. However, these are not traditional fountain pens, and they are relatively inexpensive (especially when compared to some of my other art pens) so I decided that in the spirit of experimental Inktober, I'd give it a whirl.

One pen filled with pokeberry, the other with walnut.

These pens fill via piston, similar in action to a syringe, but the piston must be twisted to work. Twist the piston end of the pen until the plunger is all the way down, dip the brush end into the ink, and twist the piston back out to fill. You will want to fully submerge the tip, which means this will not work with just a shallow pool of ink! I found when I filled from the Noodler's tester tube, the narrow deep shape worked nicely. The chamber will not fill all the way, and it will fill slowly, so go slowly and let the pen tip stay submerged for a few seconds after you finish with the piston. You'll hear a little click when you get to the stopping point - that's a lock intended to keep the piston from being bumped and potentially dumping ink during use. 

Walnut ink in the fountain brush pen is quite suitable for a wild rabbit.

I'm very happy with these pens. None of them, not even the one I've had banging around full for nearly a month now, have leaked. They do take a little priming to get started right after filling or after extended storage, but wiping and working them gently on scrap paper does the trick there. I'm tempted to buy more to have more colors on hand, or experiment with more homemade inks! I will also note that the inks I loaded into the pen were filtered carefully through paper filters to eliminate most particulate. You would definitely not want to try loading unfiltered into these. 

Check them out on Amazon, at $16 for a three-pack they have a lot of potential for portable inking!