Decided to switch to more traditional pen and ink today. Also, my Copic Multiliner SP 0.1 pen arrived yesterday and I wanted to take it for a spin right away. I’ve been using Sakura Micron pens for some years now since, as one artist friend put it, they have been the “gold standard”. But I’d become increasingly irritated with them. The nibs didn’t hold their hardness and the lines became irregular and unpredictable. Drove me crazy in the field. Plus I never liked that they were disposable. And I wasn’t going to start up with Rapidographs again. Been there, done that, battled the clogging. Plus expensive.

I’ve been seeing the Copic name around for a year or so (first encountered it as tools in Autodesk Sketchbook, then as markers, not drawing pens, and I gather this is a newish product. The SPs have an aluminum body and ink cartridges. I’m going to see If I can refill mine once it’s empty. But least one isn’t throwing a whole pen away

So I dove in this morning and did this fairly quick drawing of a wildebeest I saw and photographed in Kenya (I only draw and paint from my own reference). Overall, I like the pen. At first it did not like being moved away from me one bit and was skritchy and cranky. I thought that might be a dealbreaker. But it finally “broke in” and that wasn’t a problem anymore. I kept the technique simple…mostly vertical parallel lines, no crosshatching. I did a pencil underdrawing first.

I’ll try a few more pieces with it and then decide if I’m going to pop for the ten pen set ($59.95 through Blick). The drawing was done in a Stillman and Birn Beta series sketchbook.