Kuretake Ink Pen - Double-sided Brush Pen No.55

When I visited Tokyo I happened across a pen I really liked, and luckily it has many variations. The pen was a Kuretake brush pen, though it took me a little while to figure out what it was, as almost nothing on the pen was written with roman letters or English.

The Kuretake No.55 is an excellent double-sided brush pen. I like how it was a bit smoky, it was a lot like drawing with water on a Buddha Board. Here is a detail photo of a warmup drawing I did, where you can see the smokiness of the ink pretty well:

I went on to make this drawing of lupine with the pen:

What I really like about this pen is that the two nib sizes are about all one really needs to make a good drawing. The ultra thin brush is nice to do detail work, and the larger brush on the other end is good for shading or blacking out large areas, and larger linework. And it’s just one pen, so it makes working much quicker.

The ink does take a bit of time to dry so it’s a good idea to work from left to right in a drawing (if you’re righthanded like me, if you’re lefthanded, the opposite of what I just said), or to not draw on the right and then switch to the left quickly, because the ink got on my hand pretty easily. But I actually like that it dries slowly. I think it’s what gives the ink it’s smoky, pretty look.

Here’s the other Kuretake pen I’ve used that I really liked - it was an impulse buy when I was in Tokyo. I didn’t know or understand anything about the pen, something about it just felt right and it looked cool, and it wasn’t so expensive that I felt it was out of reach, so I picked it up:

This is the other kuretake pen I’ve tried, a. much thicker, darker pen with very black ink. A very nice pen to use for drawing. Making finer lines with this pen requires a very gentle, delicate touch

Kuretake offers many other pens, and they also make eyeliner pens and other cosmetics? (Seems like a fair enough product diversity offering). The pen I got in Japan was a single-sided deep black pen, but I liked this double sided pen quite a bit more. It felt more versatile and is smaller, so easier to use.

Traveler's Notebook Scrap Pages

I finally got around to putting some of the scraps I saved from my 2019 Tokyo trip into my Traveler’s Notebook. I loosely pasted these into watercolor refill pages using gel medium.

The tickets are one thing I am very glad I saved, because I went to so many museums, and in many cases, the tickets for each museum or art show were like little art pieces in themselves.

The ticket above that says “Independent” on it was one of the cooler shows I saw, it was featuring work by new and living artists and some art students. A few photos of the show are on my instagram. It was such a big floorspace that I wandered through it for an hour or two.

The rainbow ticket above is one of my favorites. They seemed to have gone all-out for that ticket. I have the larger brochure saved for it too.

I ordered a few prints of my photos from Inkifi and pasted them into each page.

The Traveler’s Notebook is a fun way to scrapbook like this. Eventually I may add writing to the tickets too, to explain what they are inside the book. Pasting the tickets into the book is a fun way to remember the entire trip. I think I will do this on future trips as well. It’s hard not to when the little scraps of paper that I seem to get are so artful.