Dip Pens Explained: Choosing the Right Type for Swatching, Sketching & More

Hi everyone! It's Daisy here and welcome to this video of Dip Pens Explained, answering the question of why would you use a dip pen. So I have in front of me here a bunch of dip pens. You can see visually these pens are all super different, but they do fall into the category of a dip pen. First, I'm going to explain what exactly a dip pen is and why it's different from a fountain pen. Dip pens are different from fountain pens because, as the name implies, a dip pen, all you have to do to get it inked up is simply dip it into a bottle of ink. And the way that most dip pens work is they have some kind of nib, it can be made of different materials, it can be made of steel for the most part, there's brass ones, there's glass ones, and all you have to do is dip the nib into the bottle of ink and from there, the ink simply flows down the nib and on the nib itself is where the ink is stored. So that means that it doesn't hold a lot of ink because as opposed to a fountain pen which has a reservoir of ink in the back of the pen supplying ink to the nib, for a dip pen all the ink that's really on the pen itself is really what the surface of the nib can hold. So different nibs have different features that allow it to hold more ink than other nibs, but for the most part, dip pens are just holding ink on the surface of the nib itself and for that reason, it doesn't hold a lot of ink, it can really just hold whatever you get in that single dip and what allows it to write on paper is simply the absorbency of the paper drawing the ink away from the nib onto the paper. So that makes dip pens really easy to use and really easy to clean, but probably not the best for like long-term writing, long-form writing. If you're writing for pages and pages and pages, you'll have to be dipping a lot if you're writing only with a dip pen, but that is at its essence what a dip pen is as the name implies. It's a pen that you have to dip into a bottle of ink to get it writing. There's also quite a few different types of dip pens and I think that in the last maybe three to five years or so, there's kind of been a divergence in the type of dip pen. So that's why I wanted to make this video because historically, I think a lot of people think of dip pens associated with calligraphy. This is when you really hear a lot of the terms like lettering, pointed pen, oblique nib. And for most of these pens, how they work is simply there is a nib that is separate, that can separate from the nib holder. So it can separate from the nib holder and you just pull it out and when you want to put it back in, you really just kind of put it back in like that and push it in. So these nibs can look like lots of different things and companies that make these types of nibs for lettering, for calligraphy, these are like Browse, Tachikawa, Speedball, and there's a bunch of different ones like Leonard, Nikkoji. So there's a lot of different ones that have been making these nibs for many, many years. I think historically, people when you think of dip pen, they're probably thinking of a pen like this, which you would dip the nib into ink for calligraphy. And the way these nibs work and why they're really great for calligraphy is they, for the most part, have flexible tines, which this one is a Tachikawa nib and I'll use my finger here to show the flex. So if you push down on the nib, the tines of the nib actually flex out like so. And this allows calligraphers and really skilled letterers to create a line width variation, which is essentially what the skill that you're practicing in calligraphy over and over again. So calligraphy and lettering done with these calligraphy nibs are really beautiful because you can achieve extreme variation. You can achieve the thinnest, thinnest lines by pressing very, very lightly. And then you can create really, really thick lines by pressing down, just as I showed before on the tines and really separating those tines to create a thick line width. And the combination of the predictable combination of the thin lines and the thick lines in language, in writing is really what makes calligraphy so beautiful. So I'm not going to demonstrate because personally I don't do calligraphy, but that is how these pointed pen calligraphy nibs work. This video is actually not going to be talking mostly about the pointed pen calligraphy, but actually talking about the second group of dip pens that have really are more of like, I consider them like modern dip pens. I don't know if anybody else is calling them that, but for the most part, you'll see the dip pens that I'm going to be talking about in this video were released in the last three to five years and they came with this surge in fountain pen ink popularity. So over the last few years, definitely since like around the pandemic, there's just been like a boom in fountain pen inks. And as a result, people have just been like, like loving fountain pen inks and collecting many, many different colors of inks, which gave birth to this other category of dip pens. And these dip pens are dip pens that you would primarily use not for calligraphy, but just for ink swatching, for the enjoyment of fountain pen ink, and probably some quick sketching as well, as well as like writing of short notes. There are not at all meant to be used for longer form writing. So writing pages and pages, and they're definitely not really meant for calligraphy either. So here in front of me, I have some of these more like modern dip pens, the ones that we're going to be talking about in this video. And there are so many that have been released in recent years. So I kind of wanted to just take this video and explain some of the highlights of each one, some of our favorite ones and what makes them different from one another. So I'll start with these glass pens here, because these actually have not just been released over the last three or five years, these have been around for a long time. Here are a couple examples of glass pens. Glass pens have been around for a long time, and for the most part, the construction is really, really simple. And if you think about it, the construction of a dip pen is really simple. It's anything that you can dip in ink and write words with, or like make shapes on paper with. So a glass pen usually has a glass body like this, and a lot of the ones that we're seeing coming out with recently are super beautiful, made by glass artists and artisans that can really increase the price of a glass pen. And I think one of the main features of glass pens is just really that they're so pretty. But the way a glass pen works is there is a grip, a holder, the body of the pen is made of glass, and then the nib itself is glass as well, and there's grooves in it that run from the base of the nib all the way to the tip of the nib, and that is where the ink is stored when you are dipping these pens. So no matter which glass pen company you're looking at, and there are so many these days, that is the way they work. The grooves might be different shapes, but no matter how they're shaped, that is essentially how a glass pen will work, and I'll show you all. So I have a bottle of ink here. This is what people who love to ink swatch will do with their pens. They will simply use the glass pen, or whatever dip pen, to test out the ink color from the bottle of ink, and often they will write the name of the ink. So this one is a Lennon Tool Bar ink called Expansive Mist. That's pretty beautiful. And then when it comes time to clean your dip pen, all you have to do, and one of the main reasons why people love the pen, is all you have to do is swirl it around in some water, and just like that, your pen is cleaned. I'll just take a paper towel here to dry off the surface of the nib. And just like that, it's ready to be dipped into the next color. So that's one of the main features of a dip pen in general, and I just demonstrated ink swatching with a glass nib. The next dip pen that I want to talk about is the Pilot Iro Utsushi. So now I'm going to talk about some different brands, because there's lots of brands that make glass dip pens, and that really just comes down to the aesthetic and the fineness of the pen. So some glass pens are really, really fine, and some might be a little bit broader, but for the most part, you choose a glass pen because of the way it looks. It is kind of fragile to use, but they are super beautiful for ink swatching. They're good for drawing, as well as writing short notes to people. The next dip pen that I want to talk about is the Pilot Iro Utsushi. This one was released by Pilot. It's one of those that really came out in the last couple of years, and Pilot created this pen just for ink testing. So ink swatching, just like I showed before, people will create collections of the ink colors that they have in their collection, and maybe they'll have a specific section in their notebook designated for tracking what ink colors they have, because people really can't have that many ink colors. Once you grow to love fountain pen inks, it can be quite motivating and quite rewarding to just see all of your ink colors in one place. So that is what Pilot wanted to do with their Pilot Iro Utsushi nib. This dip pen is really a very simple construction. It has a body and a nib, and it looks kind of like those calligraphy nibs that we were looking at before, except that you are not able to pull this nib out at all. You're not meant to really swap this nib with other nibs. And this one, if you turn it around, it's really just a nib that's been inserted onto a body, and all you're supposed to do is dip this nib into the ink, and there are different nib sizes as well. This one is fine, so I'll show you all how this one works. The ink will sit along the surface as well as in this little hole and in the back of the nib here. The ink will get drawn down from the surface of the nib until there's no more ink, and this one doesn't hold a ton of ink just because there's not a lot of grooves on this one. It's really just the nib. So let's swatch out this next ink. You can see this one is a lot finer. This is Lennon Toolbar Island Wood is what this one's called. Let's clean this nib off. It's the same thing, just dip it in the water, squish it around, use a paper towel to dry off the nib and to kind of clean off any excess ink that's on there, and then it's good to go for the next color. That was the Pilot Iro Utsushi, and just a demonstration, this one's really best for ink swatching. It's a simple construction, this one, and what's good about this is that you do get quite a fine line with this one. Next up, I'm going to talk about the Kakimori Brass nib. Kakimori's nib is also one that was released in the last few years, and this one was really revolutionary and it still continues to be amazing. The Kakimori Brass nib looks like this. Kakimori makes their own holders as well, and the nib itself is just kind of like this little bullet-shaped nib. It comes in brass, and it also comes in stainless steel. It's such a beautiful and elegant construction because it is just this thing that has these deep grooves in it, which allows the nib, which allows the ink to really sit in those grooves and be drawn down from those grooves. So let's see how that works. I will swatch out this other ink, Miscanthus Hills, I think that says, and it's a dip pen, so of course you kind of, you know now that you just have to dip it into the bottle of ink to get it started, and with one dip, you get a lot of ink sitting in those grooves, and you get ink sitting along the surface of the pen as well. So to swatch, you go like that, and what you may be noticing with this nib is that I was able to create both a really thick swatch line here using the side of the pen, using the side of the nib, as well as a really thin line here using just the tip of the pen. So as you switch up the angle that you're writing with on this pen, you're able to make thin lines as well as thick lines, which allows you to go from sketching to writing, or from sketching something and coloring it in to just drawing really fine details of the artwork. So this one is called, and as you just run out of ink on one side, you simply just have to rotate it to another side to draw ink from a new set of grooves. Okay, and let's see how easy this one is to clean. Also really easy. Spoiler, it's also really easy. Okay, so yeah, same thing, you want to just dry it off with a paper towel, and you actually want to pull this one out to dry because you don't want ink to get stuck in this Kakimori nib holder, you know, just water damage on wood and stuff. Okay, that was the Kakimori brass nib, and then next up we're going to look at the Sailor Hokuto. These we talk about a lot here at Yoseka, you're able, this is actually the nib itself, the nib is kind of hidden within the pen barrel, you pull out the nib, like such, to uncap it, and then you just snap it into place to cap it. So there are different sizes for this nib, the one that I'm demonstrating here today is the Fude nib, but it does come in fine, medium, as well as calligraphy stub nibs, so that's what's good about this one, and the construction of this one is pretty simple as well, there is a nib on the top, this is the stainless steel nib, and then if you flip it around to the back side, there is a grey plastic part called the feed. So this, as you can imagine, this, because there's like a lot more going on on this nib, this nib actually holds more ink than a lot of other ones because of that grey plastic feed, but it is, the feed is constructed in a way that still allows you to clean the pen really easily just by squishing it around in the water. So let's swatch out our ink here, I have Lennon Toolbar Deep Mountain, these are all really beautiful colors, so you dip the pen into the ink, I think I dipped a little too far on this one, but that's okay, so with this one, it's a Fude nib, which you saw before had kind of like a bent shape to it, which similar to the Kakimora allows you to make these thicker strokes like this for swatching, and then if you write on an upturned angle like this, you can do the thinner strokes as well, like that. So this one is Lennon Toolbar Deep Mountain, okay. And let's see how easy it is to clean, I have my jar of water here, swish swish swish, you can see just like how much ink came out and how the water's all this green color now, that this one held probably the most ink I would say, just because of that feed. Same thing, paper towels, dry off, and you can also pull this one out to dry, I guess you got, I got a little bit of ink over here because of how deep I dipped it, you can just clean that off, but the best thing about this one is simply that you can cap it back like this, and it can go back into your pen case. We looked at four different dip pens, we looked at some general glass dip pens, which are for the most part all the same I would say, and you would choose that based on how beautiful it is to you, the design that you really want, and we looked at the Pilot Iro Utsushi dip pen, which is great for just pretty simple swatching, and if you really want like a finer size, the Pilot Iro Utsushi might be the one for you, and then we looked at the Kakimori Brass nib, which is ideal for sketching and swatching as well, but I know a lot of artists really really love the Kakimori Brass nib because of how dynamic you can get those lines, and how smooth it is, it's really really smooth to write with, and then we looked at the Sailor Hokoro nib, which is really best, my vote for best overall pick, because you can do so much with it, you can write with it, you can write short, you can write long because it has the feed, you can do beautiful ink swatching, you can do ink swatching with all of these nibs that we talked about, and you can also cap it, and I think that's one of the features that really differentiates the Hokoro from all the other ones, is that you can easily travel around with it, and you know, do whatever, use it wherever you want, if you want to swatch inks in a cafe, or if you want to dip it into some watercolor or something and do some liquid watercolor and do something there, you can do that as well. So hopefully today's video helped you understand dip pens a little bit more, how the modern dip pens are really quite different from the traditional calligraphy dip pens that have flex tips that you would use for pointed pen calligraphy or for lettering, but modern dip pens are primarily for playing around with inks, for sketching and for art, and mainly for like ink swatching and deciding what ink goes into your fountain pen. So I hope you guys enjoyed this video, let us know if you have any more questions about dip pens, I think dip pens are something that all of us at Yoseka really really enjoy playing around with because we just love inks so much here, so yeah, I hope you try a dip pen after watching this video, let us know in the comments if you do. Thank you so much for watching, bye!