One of my sets of Rotring Artpens, marked with red electrical tape to show they're loaded with permanent ink.
I really love Rotring Artpens, albeit in a Platonic way; I've used them as my main tool for sketching and page layout work for more than twenty years. I like them so much I own two full sets of the drawing nibs (EF, F, M and B) - one set filled with permanent Rotring Artpen ink, the other with ordinary non-permanent fountain-pen ink.
My one bugbear with Artpens (aside from the fact that the caps on the new ones no longer plug onto the end of the barrels, leaving them wandering about to get lost while you're drawing) is their tendency to dry out. I'm not a complusive sketcher by any means, so I can easily go six weeks between sessions, and a common experience on breaking my Artpens out after such a period of inactivity was to find at least one of them hopelessly dried out. Bringing the pen back from the dead would usually mean half a swearing-hour* spent running hot water through the nib and then endlessly blotting to try and get the dried ink out.
Imagine my delight-crossed-with annoyance when, after twenty years of such tomfoolery, I discovered a simple answer to the problem; just dip the end of the nib in water for a few seconds until ink starts to pool in the water, then scribble on a piece of paper to get the pen going. The ink will come through highly dilute at first, but will soon darken to black. A really recalcitrant nib might take two or three goes, but on the whole, I can get any one of my pens running in under a minute.
You don't even need much water for the operation; old bottle-caps take just the right amount, and are handy to carry if you're sketching on the move.
Originally, I wasn't going to bother publishing this discovery, as it seemed so obvious I assumed I was the only one who had missed it. However, at Bristol I got talking to a group of fellow artists, all of whom had this trouble with Artpens and none of whom knew this method., so I hope it's worth mentioning.
*Swearing-hour: measurement of the time spent trying to get anything to work. Most often applied to new pieces of technology or software. Other units of time may also be employed to describe longer or shorter periods; as in "my first computer took two full swearing-weeks to set up, but the new one took only five swearing-minutes!"
UPDATE: though I haven't reied this myself, an anonymous poster tells me that Noodler's Ink is supposed to be very good for Artpens, being both black and non-clogging.
My one bugbear with Artpens (aside from the fact that the caps on the new ones no longer plug onto the end of the barrels, leaving them wandering about to get lost while you're drawing) is their tendency to dry out. I'm not a complusive sketcher by any means, so I can easily go six weeks between sessions, and a common experience on breaking my Artpens out after such a period of inactivity was to find at least one of them hopelessly dried out. Bringing the pen back from the dead would usually mean half a swearing-hour* spent running hot water through the nib and then endlessly blotting to try and get the dried ink out.
Imagine my delight-crossed-with annoyance when, after twenty years of such tomfoolery, I discovered a simple answer to the problem; just dip the end of the nib in water for a few seconds until ink starts to pool in the water, then scribble on a piece of paper to get the pen going. The ink will come through highly dilute at first, but will soon darken to black. A really recalcitrant nib might take two or three goes, but on the whole, I can get any one of my pens running in under a minute.You don't even need much water for the operation; old bottle-caps take just the right amount, and are handy to carry if you're sketching on the move.
Originally, I wasn't going to bother publishing this discovery, as it seemed so obvious I assumed I was the only one who had missed it. However, at Bristol I got talking to a group of fellow artists, all of whom had this trouble with Artpens and none of whom knew this method., so I hope it's worth mentioning.
*Swearing-hour: measurement of the time spent trying to get anything to work. Most often applied to new pieces of technology or software. Other units of time may also be employed to describe longer or shorter periods; as in "my first computer took two full swearing-weeks to set up, but the new one took only five swearing-minutes!"
UPDATE: though I haven't reied this myself, an anonymous poster tells me that Noodler's Ink is supposed to be very good for Artpens, being both black and non-clogging.
