3 Best Small-nib Brush Lettering Pens for Beginners
Do you feel overwhelmed when you are looking for a brush pen to start your brush lettering with?
Today we can find a huge range of brush pen options. For large-nib brush pens, you may know about the popular Tombow dual brush pen. However, there is not much information when it comes to small-nib brush pen. For brush calligraphy beginners, small-nib brush pen is highly recommended as the small nib is easier to control than large nib.
We reviewed 3 best brush pens series we picked for small lettering. After reading, you will be able to choose which one is the most suitable for your practice.
#1 Tombow Fudenosuke - Hard Tip
Brush Nib
The elastomer brush of the Tombow Fudenosuke hard tip brush pen is firm but responsive to pressure. It requires a fair amount of pressure to produce a thicker line. Because of this firmness, the brushes are useful for beginners - they offer good control over the strokes.
The Fudenosuke tip has a slight scratchiness of fibre on the page, but a pleasing scratchiness, not an annoying one.
Colour and Ink
The ink flows well, but the pen isn’t too inky and wet. The brushes are dry enough for strokes to be textured rather than completely solid. This renders the direction and heaviness of each stroke visible, adding visual complexity to the writing and producing an authentic brush-lettering look.
There is a good range of 10 colours for small nib brush pens. The release of the coloured Tombow Fudensouke sparked much excitement in the brush lettering community because the black version of the pen was already enormously popular. The colours are fairly standard but with a slightly non-standard hue to them - they are vivid but slightly muted in tone. The ink is also water-resistant.
External Design
The size of the Fudenosuke makes them especially useful for bullet journaling. It’s much easier to fit small writing into A5 and A6 journal pages. The pen-like size of them pens themselves makes them very portable.
The pens look like standard markers but there is a visually appealing element to their design The bright glossy colours of the cap and the end contrasts beautifully with the glossy navy of the body. The barrels are made of recycled polypropylene plastic.
#2 Pentel Fude Touch
Brush Nib
The brushes of the Pentel Fude Touch brush pens feature excellent flexibility. It allows for expressive line variation, yet is easy to control because the brush springs back to shape instantaneously. Being firm, the brush requires a fair amount of pressure to produce thicker lines. This makes it easy to control the stroke, making this brush pens beginner-friendly.
Colour and Ink
The pens are quite inky (inkier than the Tombow Fudenosuke and the Pilot Fude Makase) and draw fairly solid lines. They do create some colour variation within the stroke with fast strokes but most of the standard-speed strokes come out solid due to the relatively heavy ink flow.
The colours are of a fairly standard ‘Western’ colour palette, but they are wonderfully vivid tones of each colour.
External Design
These torpedo-shaped pens aren’t in the running to win a beauty contest. The sparkliness of their barrels belies the sophistication and beauty of their brush strokes and the complexity of their ink colours. But the beautiful writing that they’re capable of producing far outweighs their failures as objects of beauty. And the hexagonal shape of the barrel makes them comfortable to hold.
Surprisingly, the colours of the pen bodies do not closely replicate the colours of the ink but are a more muted version of the colour.
#3 Pilot Fude Makase Color Brush Pen
Pilot’s Fude Makase Colour brush pens won the 2017 Good Design Award — and with good reason: they are exceptionally good fine-tip brush pens, and they exude an understated beauty,
Brush Tip
The Fude Makase’s brush tips are very fine and can draw extra-fine lines. The brushes are responsive to pressure, enabling you to create relatively thick lines as well. The Fude Makase’s tips are fine enough to make them useful as writing pens. The fineness of the brush tip also makes them easy to control, in contrast to thicker-tipped brush pens like the Tombow Dual Brush. It is the finest tip of the three brush pens in this review.
The felt brushes feel very smooth and luxuriant to write with.
Colour and Ink
The brushes are fairly inky — more so than the Tombow Fudenosukes and a bit less than the Pentel Fude Touch. The medium ink flow allows for some variability in the colour saturation within fast-written strokes, allowing an authentic brush lettering look. Most strokes are fairly solid.
The 8 colours that are available are fairly standard colours, but they are beautifully vivid and deep colours.
External Design
These pens are beautiful. Their design features Japanese aesthetic, yet there’s something sophisticated about the way the ecru-coloured barrels taper subtly towards the end. The ink droplet-shaped ‘window’ of transparent plastic, which shows the colour of the ink, adds a subtly sophisticated touch of beauty to this pen. The stylish coloured pocket clips add both style and functionality to the pens.
