As I waited patiently for the last two weeks before my second dose of vaccine kicked in, I thought I'd treat myself to a Fude Nib Fountain Pen. I have dabbled with brush pens, fudenosuke pens and italics fountain pens, but this one is a little different, it has a bent nib. This one is a Duke Sapphire Fude Pen (link to amazon here).

This is by no means a high end pen, it is actually very inexpensive, barely $20, but it doesn't feel too cheaply made and most important of all, IT'S SOOOOO PRETTY. You didn't even see the blue rhinestone on the cap. :-)

The effect is very similar to a brush pen or other fudenosuke pen, but the manipulation of this pen is a little different. Instead of pressing down as in a traditional fude or brush pen, this requires very little to make the line thinner or thicker. After a little time of practice, I filled it up with my favorite ink and created a few pictures.

This one has beginning of waybop (Zentangle) and some Garlic Cloves (Jacquelien Bredenoord). The rest is just echolines and testing. The fun thing is that the ink is watersoluble, so I used the waterbrush to create darker areas, then enhanced with a regular Micron PN and colored pencils.

Here's the second picture I made, both over Phi Tan tile (I bought a huge box of tan Phi tiles by mistake, now I have to use them up, right!).

The thing about this pen — and probably most soft brush pens — is that you have to LET GO THE NEED FOR CONTROL. It requires a great deal of trust to draw like that. The ink bleeds, the pen can't be governed, the lines are shaky, the lines become thick and thin at any small movement or pressure.

At first I thought — this is a nightmare. But then, as I created my third picture below, it started to dawn on me that there was some kind of natural beauty in letting go of control. The only time I had some control over the lines was if I moved very quickly across the paper, like the wind. The picture even look like the flowers are blowing in the wind.

This is the fourth picture, where I decided to simply let go of control and introduced a Marvy brush pen (similar to Tombow pens, water soluble). Adding water brush to the mix made things bleed crazy all over the place. But I kept my cool, and went with it. I'm so happy with this one, it's my favorite.

Then, something ODD happened. I was browsing through Instagram and ran into Veronica Vazquez's daily live Zentangle session. Veronica is a lovely and good-humored Spanish-speaking CZT who cares deeply about her students. Visit Veronica's IG here. Thank you Vero!

I figured…. hmmm, why not? Well, Veronica was working on a design in black and white, I arrived halfway the session, so that meant I had to work a little faster to keep up. And between that speed, and letting go of my need to control the lines so precisely, THE PEN YIELDED. (Or was it me that yielded to the pen?? :-)

I am in love with this picture. It has tangles I would never tried myself, Flevo by Mariet and Moontear by Victoria, Mooka and some stuff I don't even know. Here is a close-up of the line-art, you can see how the pen bleeds all over the place and the water-soluble ink reacts to a waterbrush.

I treated it more or less similarly the same way as the others, fine-tuning the lines with a brown Micron, adding some other brush pens dissolved with waterbrush and colored pencils. Topped off with a white gel pen.

Here is a short step-out:

It was an interesting process of discovery, I think I might use it more in the future. If you are interested in taking a class on how you too can learn to LET GO WITH A BRUSH PEN, then contact me and let me know.

Feel free to share or pin these pictures.