Big, dry-writing pens?

[Al-fresco]

A Kaweco Brass Sport with a fine nib and Diamine Ancient Copper cartridges is so dry I use it for crossword puzzles.

[twigletzone]

3 hours ago, Al-fresco said:

A Kaweco Brass Sport with a fine nib and Diamine Ancient Copper cartridges is so dry I use it for crossword puzzles.

I'm sure at some point I'll get a Sport but it hasn't happened to me yet... it's one of those pens I struggle to persuade myself to try because I don't find the aesthetics of it pleasing. (I have a love of painfully elegant updates of traditional design, a lot of Faber-Castell's pens also Displease Me in the same sense because they're too modernist.)

 

I love the mental image of flaming copper crosswords though!

[brokenclay]

  

11 hours ago, twigletzone said:

Ooh! Thank you for the heads-up. Burgundy was actualy the one I liked so no issue there

 

So many nib choices though...  actual cursive italic. To the reviews section, Batman!

 

I have  two, one with a medium (non-italic) nib, it's great; the other with a broad cursive nib, it's a little balky, flow-wise but a smooth writer. I'm playing with different converters/cartridges to try to pin down the flow issue. I did buy the first one with a fine nib, found it too fine for my taste, and swapped it for medium without any issues under Mr. Pen's 30 day nib exchange policy.

[twigletzone]

27 minutes ago, brokenclay said:

  

 

I have  two, one with a medium (non-italic) nib, it's great; the other with a broad cursive nib, it's a little balky, flow-wise but a smooth writer. I'm playing with different converters/cartridges to try to pin down the flow issue. I did buy the first one with a fine nib, found it too fine for my taste, and swapped it for medium without any issues under Mr. Pen's 30 day nib exchange policy.

 

How is the width of the broad cursive? I love the thought of the cursives but I couldn't figure out from the various writing samples I googled up where in the general size range they fall. My writing isn't super duper tiny "can only write legibly with an EF" territory, most of my pens are European mediums, but it's certainly not large - I'm currently leaning towards fine cursive but I really couldn't see a lot of difference between that and the samples written with the medium cursive. (I already know I'll enjoy the line variation -  I had a phase of writing with a fine italic at school that drove my teachers nuts because it sometimes reduced the letters to blobs. It was an Osmiroid calligraphy nib, I still have it and it's a square-cut italic rather than an oblique which makes me somewhat prouder to have made it my everyday pen despite being a leftie!)

[brokenclay]

Sorry, not the very best photo. I'd say it's quite similar to the 1.1 stub nibs I have. 

 

 

[twigletzone]

38 minutes ago, brokenclay said:

 

Sorry, not the very best photo. I'd say it's quite similar to the 1.1 stub nibs I have. 

 

 

Hmm, it really doesn't look that broad at all. Mind you I suppose the idea of a cursive italic is to be practical for everyday writing, rather than impressive for calligraphy.

Mind you with the exchange program I can always swap it if what I order doesn't agree with me. Thank you for the sample

[sandy101]

If you want something to show of sheen, and shading, you need a broad stub in my humble opinion.

[A Smug Dill]

14 minutes ago, sandy101 said:

If you want something to show of sheen, and shading, you need a broad stub in my humble opinion.

 

Whereas I'm of the opposite opinion. A sheening ink that is worth showing off will exhibit sheen even when used for writing with a Japanese F nib; similarly, highly shading inks. Otherwise, I could use a cotton swab or paintbrush and do multiple passes over the page where I want parts of marks, shapes or trails to look darker than the rest, and call it shading.

 

Just to be clear, that's not speaking against the use of broad-edged nibs. An italic nib that puts down vertical lines of about 0.4mm wide, and horizontal lines of about half that, is wonderful for ‘line variation’ and writing flair while showing extraordinary precision in the technique of the wielder.

[hariharan]

Any japanese pen is a dry writer relative to its european counterpart. You can go for pilot or platinum models. But i agree with others that you dont necessarily need a dry nib, but a stub nib to show off the sheen. 

[twigletzone]

11 hours ago, A Smug Dill said:

 

Whereas I'm of the opposite opinion. A sheening ink that is worth showing off will exhibit sheen even when used for writing with a Japanese F nib; similarly, highly shading inks. Otherwise, I could use a cotton swab or paintbrush and do multiple passes over the page where I want parts of marks, shapes or trails to look darker than the rest, and call it shading.

 

Just to be clear, that's not speaking against the use of broad-edged nibs. An italic nib that puts down vertical lines of about 0.4mm wide, and horizontal lines of about half that, is wonderful for ‘line variation’ and writing flair while showing extraordinary precision in the technique of the wielder.

Sheen isn't my holy grail - I mostly remember it being a telltale of my pen having dumped more ink than it should when I was at school. (My school required us to use generic washable blue, so a challenge to get sheen from 😁 - I mostly started seeing this happen once I decided I was grown up enough to be naughty and use Sheaffer black instead.) But I'd definitely love to see more shading.

As it happens, though, I'm currently getting a minimal amount of shading from a Waterman M with Serenity Blue, so I think I'm coming down on your side of the debate overall. I've made it one of my 2021 projects to work on rescuing my cursive a bit, but I also think I should wait until I see some real results from that before I reward myself with a nib that would make my current scrawl more illegible than it already is! I think the right strategy would be to buy one of the finer cursives now then treat myself to a spare unit in broad a bit later.

[A Smug Dill]

9 hours ago, twigletzone said:

But I'd definitely love to see more shading.

As it happens, though, I'm currently getting a minimal amount of shading from a Waterman M with Serenity Blue,

 

Plenty of shading (N.B. I'm not making that assertion with respect to Waterman Serenity Blue, because I haven't tested that ink and have no interest in doing so, even though I have a bottle of it just because of its reputation) can be produced with even finer nibs:

 

[twigletzone]

I believe you! I seem to have a natural talent for deciding I like inks that don't shade though. I've got at least two that pretty much don't shade at all (Diamine Sargasso Sea being one). I can fit a few more into the collection before I hit the "stop it you have no storage space and you'll never use it all" point though, so I'm paying more attention to reviews now...