Comparing small brush pens:

It can be overwhelming to try to select the best tools for the latest project you have decided to take on. I would be willing to guess that you found this blog because you share many of the same curiosities and stumbling stones that I have! Regardless of the steps that led you here, I am inviting you to come along on my journey into these explorations. Every calligraphy tool has a "sweet spot" where its performance shines and the manufacturer has tested that performance prior to releasing the product. The next step is testing my familiarity with those products. 

How I approach this process and analyze and compare brush pens

•  Step 1: Select an assortment of the brush pens I want to test and compare
  • Pentel Sign Touch Brush Pen (green)
  • Tombow Fudenosuke hard tip (orange)
  • Tombow Fudenosuke soft tip (black)
  • Zebra Funwari Brush Pen (pink)
  • Uniball UniBrushPin (light grey)
  • Marvy Uchida Le Pen Flex (fuchsia)
  • Pentel Sign Touch XF Brush Pen (ochre)
  • Writech Sign Brush Pen (turquoise)
• Step 2: Write a range of different letter sizes to compare the tool to itself
  • I started on the left side of the page with a 5mm x-height and progressed across the page increasing each x-height by 5mm every adjustment
  • Pay attention to the little details and differentiate what size each brush pen felt unnatural both too large and too small (either mental or physical notes)
    

• Step 3: Explore the writing using more text than a few letters
  • In the photos below, you can see I have chosen to write a more diverse selection in 2 of the x-heights that felt like they worked across most of the writing samples
    • 10mm x-height
    • 15mm x-height

There are so many other things to explore but I hope you enjoyed reading some of my observations and explore with me.