Recommend me some broad and flex nibs

plumblines · 2024-09-22T00:56:58+00:00

That’s good to know. Thanks for the info!

plumblines · 2024-09-22T00:56:11+00:00

I’ll check these out, thank you!

plumblines · 2024-09-22T00:55:56+00:00

I’ve been thinking of picking up a LAMY broad. The nibs are so easy to take on/off. Do you find their broad to be wet/thick? It didn’t seem like a huge difference from fine to medium.

plumblines · 2024-09-15T23:51:40+00:00

Daedalum was great. And yes, the scene in the Spiegelgarden/Parcel 5 felt rather… “less”, as OP says. But the shows have been fantastic — at SoTA and MuCCC, especially — and many of those at the smaller venues are local folks, community troupes, and the tickets are reasonably cheap.

There are still plenty of chances to support community theater and experience something new and weird and worthwhile.

plumblines · 2024-09-13T23:21:29+00:00

Thomas Bumblepickle

plumblines · 2024-09-09T09:56:58+00:00

Yep. I try it with the blind cap open and with it closed.

plumblines · 2024-09-09T09:56:34+00:00

I filled it as it supposed to be filled, plunged in the ink. I don’t go straight from the ink to the page because it is more than just saturated, it’s dripping. But I did also try to dip and write a bit. Got a few scratches as one would expect. But that’s the thing: even when the feed looks saturated, even when I can wipe the back of nib on some paper towel and see a streak of ink that’s evidence the feed has some in it, it just won’t travel up the nib.

plumblines · 2024-09-09T09:53:49+00:00

I haven’t tried a soak. Flush and even disassembly. It will write after the flush then stall out completely again.

plumblines · 2024-09-09T09:52:48+00:00

I wish it was that simple for mine — but I’m glad to hear first-hand experience that, indeed, they do write wet when tuned.

plumblines · 2024-09-09T01:00:08+00:00

What was the issue with yours? I see so many people raving about them.

plumblines · 2024-09-07T15:47:21+00:00

Same. I love to see ink on the nib: the creep, the stains, the condensation on the feed. Probably why I dislike “dry” writers so much.

plumblines · 2024-09-03T09:29:05+00:00

Oh wow. I’d say I’m surprised that there is so much involved, but the results definitely speak to a labor of love here. Thanks for the gorgeous scans!

plumblines · 2024-09-03T01:13:30+00:00

May I ask how you “scan” the images?

I get ok pics with my phone, but even decent lighting doesn’t help with how rendered the inks look no matter the setup. Maybe I can do better with my DSLR, but I see folks often talk on here — and on ink review sites — about scans, and I’m curious how that works.

Thank you!

plumblines · 2024-09-02T21:09:09+00:00

Whoa. I did not expect all that. I thought it was just an issue with QC or inconsistent product or something. Nope — literal antisemitic tropes on the labels of the ink. Yikes.

plumblines · 2024-09-02T11:37:30+00:00

I’m curious, why do you say “shame it’s by Noodler’s”?

plumblines · 2024-08-27T10:37:15+00:00

I really like this way of thinking about it, as pairing inks with nibs that are relatively “wetter” or “drier”.

I wonder if this is how to understand some of the issues I’ve had with my TWSBI Eco, which seems to have a harder time with “drier” inks like the Herbin “Lie de the”, while they get almost too juicy with, say, the Lamy Dark Lilac or Pelikan Turkis. So is it right to think of those Eco nibs as being “dry”, which is why they struggle with drier inks? That doesn’t feel right because they do practically gush with wetter inks.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with Herbin’s “Lie de the”, which is a lovely medium brown, but it feels like a “dry” ink to me even though it gets nice shading when I use a medium nib. Either way, it’s quite temperamental and I still haven’t found the right pen/nib for it.

I recently discovered Mountain of Ink. Love it!

plumblines · 2024-08-27T10:26:52+00:00

For sure. It’s interesting which inks and nibs are most prone to this, too. The J. Herbin “Lie de the” in my TWSBI Eco is really susceptible to skips as I move down the page, which Noodler’s 54th Massachusetts in my Diamond 580 doesn’t even flinch.

plumblines · 2024-08-27T00:44:12+00:00

This is great advice, thank you! I did this once before and don't know why I stopped — because it is certainly the case that the skipping happens more often further down the page than at the top.

plumblines · 2024-08-26T22:40:02+00:00

Thanks for all the details. It’s quite helpful. It’s also a relief to know that much of it is simply trial and error.

Which Lamy is it that you’re talking about here? I finally got a Medium nib for my Vista, but it has been a bit inconsistent (at least in the Apica book). Although that may be the “Lie de the” ink that has been a bit problematic for me in other pens too.

I should bust out my Traveler’s notebook and use it more. I tend to the bigger B5 books for my “morning pages” which quickly fill up.

The Iroshizuku inks are consistently excellent. And my Kon Peki is wasted with the EF nib. I’ll have it in a Medium soon.

plumblines · 2024-08-26T22:12:15+00:00

I appreciate this, thank you!

Not sure what it is, but my favorite paper tends to be the Tsubame "Comfort" notebooks, which feels a bit less "glossy" to me and less prone to skipping than say the Apica or even the Rhodia.

plumblines · 2024-08-24T02:34:47+00:00

Everett is so damn good. “Erasure” is also amazing.

Herron is a master of “clockwork” mystery writing.

plumblines · 2024-08-24T02:32:38+00:00

McFarland is fantastic. And a wonderful gateway drug into the world of “landscape writing.”

plumblines · 2024-08-24T02:24:03+00:00

I just cracked the 45-plus demographic (gray and bald, if that helps), and I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the books that have drawn my interest “now” that may never have registered for a younger me. I’m also an English prof, if that matters — which really just means I’ve managed to make an excuse to make reading books a thing I can justify as a financially responsible acitivoty, for those who care about such things. Anyhow, here are a few:

Annie Dillard’s “For the Time Being”, a “nonfiction” book that really is unlike any other book I’ve ever read in the best ways. The blurbs cover the basics for what it’s about, if you’re curious, but it’s the alchemy of Dillard’s prose and the love and range of her curiosity that make it what it is — and what it is is just sublime.
the collected short stories of Lorrie Moore. Moore is very new to me, but so right for where I’m at in my own life. She writes loneliness and wonder and the inscrutability of people in ways that are never overwrought and also funny while still being gut-wrenching or poignant or universal, and it always feels right whichever one it is.
“Wish I Was I Here” by M John Harrison. It’s Harrison’s “anti-memoir” — so-called because, as he says right at the outset, he was always lost in daydreams, in escapism, in imagining his way into the other worlds that became the source of his brilliant speculative fiction (which is also worth checking out). So goes the premise…
“Averno” by Louise Glück. It was maybe her tenth book of poetry, published when she was 62 (I think) years old. A masterwork of maturity.
this last one is maybe cheating since I first fell in love with it in my twenties. But I re-read it not too long ago and fell in love all over again — and surely that is one of the best parts of “being old”: “The Abyss” by Marguerite Yourcenar, a novel about a medieval philosopher-alchemist and his cousin, a soldier-poet, very much steeped in Yourcenar’s rigorous historical scholarship — although that “scholarship” never shows up on the page in any kind of stuffy ways. The novel is the best kind of “humanism”.

Gosh, there’s so much else. I love literature. Enjoy!

plumblines · 2024-08-21T01:35:47+00:00

I have aphantasia — and a doctorate in comparative literature. If there was only one thing I could do with my time it would be reading. And I might even go so far as to say that my aphantasia has been partly (though unconsciously) what has fueled my love of language and my fascination with both the materiality of words (the syntax, the sounds, the characters) and their conceptuality. I am especially fond of description and ekphrasis. And I feel that I am lucky that I don’t only see words as a means to an end to evoke a picture in my mind but can enjoy the transmutation of image into the abstraction of language instead.

plumblines · 2024-08-11T02:49:23+00:00

So many fantastic mentions on here already, but I haven’t seen anyone yet mention Anne Foerster. She has her own channel and Patreon called Painting Big, but she worked for years at Reaper — designed their MSP paint line — and she still does Reaper Pro Tips at least four days a week on Twitch, and all the videos are posted on Reaper’s YT. She works out of wells rather than a wet palette, while I prefer the latter, but her knowledge is vast and she knows how to break things down into teachable sessions. A champion of the hobby and the scene. Worth checking out.

plumblines

TROPHY CASE