Friday, March 13, 2009

More water brushes!

I got some new Kuretake water brushes in the mail today. Previously I only had the Kuretake "petit set" that consists of a brush with a very small reservoir that folds into itself to protect the brush when stored. It's a set because it also comes with a little water bottle for filling the reservoir when needed. This has been a good set for tossing in the bag to add a little color to sketches when out in the wild.

Three new water brushes in different sizes and one old water brush and a brush pen to compare them to.

The new brush pens come in three brush sizes. They also come in two lengths, I chose the shorter ones because they fit better wherever I put them and the barrel would hold plenty of water for my purposes anyway. The small brush is the same size as the one in the petit set. The medium one is as long as my Pentel pocket brush pen, but a little wider and the same size as my Kuretake brush pens loaded with paint. The small one is narrower than the pocket brush pen. The large one is slightly larger than the Pentel color brushes I have, it's really quite large.

These new pens have a bit more to their mechanism than the petit one. In fact, they look all around suspiciously like the loaded brushes. This makes me think I could probably load them up with something with more staining power than water and it would be alright for the most part. Here all the water is forced through the brush to get to your paper or wherever you want it to go.

So far I have tried the small one out for a few strokes. Like the petit, it will dribble if squeezed hard enough as there are grooves to allow water out near the top of the brush. However, in usual operation without hard squeezing everything reliably passes into the top of the brush. Like with the petit, I sometimes felt like the water was flowing too quickly so I guess the different structure doesn't have a different result.