Drawing with a Sailor FUDE Calligraphy Fountain Pen – Don Low Recently in the month of July, I bought a Sailor calligraphy fountain pen at $20 plus from Straits Commercial, after I found out that a favourite artist of mine uses Sailor too. It comes with 4 cartridges with black waterproof ink so it is a pen quite suitable for location drawing. You can replace the cartridge with ease on the go. However I prefer to use a converter so I can use my own ink for the pen. Fortunately another friend (Maria Regina) found it at Tokyu Hands and she kindly bought one for me. I was elated of course. So far I have been syringing my ink or eye dropping my own ink into a used cartridge. Not a difficult process though but the converter still comes in handy. The converter fits quite nicely into the section of the pen. Ever since I bought the Sailor, I have been using it more than my work horse, a Hero fountain pen. I have been carrying several Hero fountain pens in my bag; 918, M86 and 578… all of them offer the kind of line varieties that I want on my drawings. They are all different though and offer different line characteristics. Sailor however, (I am not saying it is better) weighs less and it gives every kind of lines I want, including very thin lines. Most importantly, even when I draw very very fast, the lines do not skip, or do not have the tendency to skip. It draws immediately after uncapping and requires no priming. I guess the screw cap prevents the ink from drying on the feed and nib. I like it that it has a long pen body. I reckon I could change a different handling method to draw differently too. Here are some drawings I did with a single Sailor pen.




I need to also mention that different paper surface affects the line quality too. Sizing of the paper types changes the absorbency of ink as well as paper texture. So it is fun to experiment.