DrawBot – Pen Selection, Part II

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I believe my next challenge, aside from better DrawBot calibration, is to find a good pen and paper combination.

This afternoon after I got back from a meeting, but before I went back to the office, I stopped off at an office supply store.  The local craft/hobby store near work didn’t have any really big rolls of butcher/craft paper – which was very disappointing.  Luckily, the office supply store had a slightly larger roll of white paper. 1

I really went there to check out the pens.  And, there were a LOT of these pens.  An entire side of one large aisle was devoted to pens.  However, since this was an office supply store, you could only buy these pens in office supply quantities for office supply amounts.  I was not about to drop $20.00 for a five pack of multi-colored pens only to find out that that style of pen just doesn’t work in a near-horizontal drawing robot kung fu grip.  I even checked out the pen refills, which were more reasonable – but the selection wasn’t there.

One thing I did while I was there was write down the name of every brand name pen manufacturer I saw.  Here’s the list I came up with:

  • BIC
  • Cross
  • Montblanc
  • Paper Mate
  • Parker Quink
  • Penatia
  • Pentel
  • Pigma
  • Pilot
  • Sharpie
  • Uni ball
  • Waterman

While I understand Montblanc and Waterman pens to be on the expensive side, I would gladly pay for a pen that “just worked.”  I would point out that the Pigma was no where to be seen at the office supply store.  This is a really nice quality art pen and I’m actually surprised I didn’t see any of them when I was at the craft/hobby story yesterday.

One other side note… while at that craft/hobby store I noticed fountain pens.  I’ve never tried to write with one, but I did wonder how effective they would be in a nearly horizontal orientation.  It could result in some very cool drawing effects.

But, for now I think I’ll focus on robot calibration for the moment while I ponder this move.  In the meantime, if you’ve got a pen suggestion, please let me know!

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  1. For slightly cheaper than the craft store too! [↩]