Why I use Fountain pens with pen plotters

First, I fell in love with code. Then came pen plotters because I could use code to instruct them to draw things that I found beautiful. After that, I fell in love with inks because my drawings needed spectrums of color. Finally, I stumbled upon the world of fountain pens.

When I first bought my Axidraw pen plotter in 2018, I eagerly set it up on a piece of plywood in my office; at the time, I had not built a table for it. Since then, I've built two. I hastily affixed some 8.5x11 printer paper below it and attached a black ballpoint pen to the pen holder. I took my Processing sketch and exported it as an SVG and was off to the races.

Since then, I've honed things in. I've done two exhibitions with Feral File (-GRAPH & +GRAPH), during which 60 plotter drawings were created, auctioned off, and shipped worldwide. My drawings have grown in complexity, often taking upwards of 10 hours for the machine to trace fully. A foolproof system to reliably reproduce artworks has been vital to my artistic practice, and I would like to share some key discoveries I've made.

This article will focus specifically on pens and inks. I've documented my technical process building plotter art too, which you can read about here.

I've purchased many different pens in the last few years. Various pens and, more importantly, different inks possess distinct properties. From ballpoints to gel pens to fine liners to fountain pens, I have tried to sample them all to experiment with these characteristics.

Eventually, I landed on fountain pens as my preferred drawing instrument for a host of reasons:

• They're eco-friendly. I can refill the pen cartridge with a syringe to reuse it continuously.
• There's a tremendous ink selection available.
• The ink has several intriguing properties, including sheening, shimmering, shading, and multi-chromatic effects.
• Tolerances are generally tight, and I can rely upon individual pens to operate similarly.
• I can buy large volumes of ink at my leisure, which lasts for quite a long time.
• Fountain pen nibs come in various sizes, from extra fine to broad, giving me variety in the widths of my lines.

Inks, inks, and inks

There's a beautiful world of fountain pen ink being manufactured by everyone from established conglomerates like MonteBlanc to upstart brands to PHD chemists.

A vibrant group of enthusiasts on r/fountainpens will routinely post their latest ink purchases along with colorful swatches. These posts have been an excellent resource for finding ways to spend money on more ink bottles.

Here are some of my favorites:

Pilot Iroshizuku inks

These inks come in a family of 24 distinct colors. Fulfilling most of the color wheel, the selection offers a variety of deep and beautiful tones. They're also well-behaved and won't clog pens or go down spotty. I have gravitated to Iroshizuku inks for a lot of my recent works. I also appreciate that Pilot sells small 15ml and large 50ml bottles.

High Sheen inks

Sheening inks showcase the unique possibilities available to fountain pens. They change color based on the viewing angle, lighting, and paper saturation. The most striking examples will appear as deep saturated blue and metallic red, however other permutations exist. They can be a chore to clean though, and may smear for days after application.

Some of my favorites include:

• Diamine Jack Frost
• Organics Studio Walden

Platinum blacks—Carbon and Chou Kuro

Platinum's inks are my go-to for black drawings. Carbon black is archival quality, flows well, and has a nice subtle silver sheen to it. I've used this in conjunction with watercolors since it stays in place so well.

Chou Kuro is a new release that purports to be the blackest ink available. In my testing, this does appear to be accurate, it's a black hole. It's temperamental and reacts poorly to tap water, so users must have distilled water on hand to clean pens.

Sailor Ink Studio inks

Sailor makes many beautiful collections of inks, from well-behaved variants to color-changing inks. The Studio collection, however, features multi-chroma inks with pigments that do not entirely mix and create multiple shades and hues within the ink. 123 is my favorite of the suite, and it has tones of gray, green, and purple, reminiscent of a pigeon.

De Atramentis Document inks

I reach for the Document series of inks when I need archival-quality, waterproof inks. They offer all the primary colors and are even mixable.

Ink Samples

I suggest buying samples of inks instead of full bottles. It's much more cost-effective and has allowed me to try dozens of options before committing to large quantities of ink.

Retailers such as Yoseka Stationary and Goulet Pens offer samples.

I routinely visit MountainOfInk.com to compare ink swatches. The site owner has methodically collected hundreds of sample swatches and tested a variety of ink properties.

The Fountain Pen collection

My fountain pen collection serves more than just my plotter art. I also picked up journaling for the mental health benefits along the enjoyment of learning to handwrite once again after years of neglecting it. The analog nature of typewriters, film cameras, and using my hand to write stuff is a nice departure from screen time.

Over time, I've acquired several pens; here are some of my favorites for plotting.

• Pilot Kakuno ($10) - The Kakuno is my preference for doing multi-color plots. I've found that the manufacturing tolerance is very tight, and it's easy to "hot-swap" the nib unit while keeping the body in the plotter arm. It also comes in extra-fine to medium nibs. Bonus feature: There's a smiley face on the nib!

• Platinum Preppy ($6) - The ultimate "cheap" fountain pen. It's refillable, reliable, and a great first pen. However, I found that the tolerances were not consistent across pens.

• Pilot Falcon SEF ($200) - A significant penvestment. Many of my favorite illustrators prefer this pen due to its variable-width gold nib. The application of pressure will increase the line size. I've enjoyed this pen for its extremely tight linework in plots.

• TWSBI Eco broad nib ($33): At the opposite end of the spectrum, the Eco can put down extremely thick lines and has a massive ink reservoir to keep up.

Honorable mentions:

• Pilot Vanishing Point ($168) - My favorite everyday writing pen due to its convenient clicking mechanism. I keep this inked at my desk at all times.
• Pilot 823 ($336) - My grail pen. It features a huge, smooth golden nib and a unique vacuum fill mechanism to hold a lot of ink.

Prices as of June 2024

Fountain pen nibs are typically made of steel or gold, which dramatically affects their price. In my experience, this did not affect the quality or precision of the final plots.

The practice of using Fountain Pens in pen plotters

My work typically includes multiple color passes. The Axidraw has the restriction of only supporting a single pen & color at a time, and this turns out to be very tricky when I'm seeking high levels of precision. Haphazardly swapping pens during a plot will almost certainly lead to the tip of the pen nib drifting and ending up in a different (x,y,z) location and misalignments occurring on the drawing. As a perfectionist, these deviations bother me to an irrational degree. While I love the imperfections apparent in plotter art (it's why I do it versus printing), not all quirks are desirable, and linework out of place cannot exist.

There are few worse experiences than doing a 10+ hour multi-color plot and having the final pass be out of alignment. The wasted time and materials will quickly add up. Each piece of paper alone may cost $5-$10.

I needed to devise a way to get very tight accuracy across colors. Vintage plotters have effectively solved this with "turrets" and programmatic pen swaps, but funny enough, a system like that doesn't exist for the modern equivalent, the Axidraw.

1. I bought a lot of pens—one pen for each color that I intend to use and sometimes more for different nib sizes and convenience (switching the color of a pen requires cleaning it out).

2. I find a good position to clamp my pen body into the Axidraw, denoted by the arrow.

3. I zero the pen nib tip to the edge of the paper. In the past, I've inset this some to plot 11"x 17" drawings on 18"x 24" paper, but with the Axidraw A1, I rarely exceed the 34"x 23" drawing area.

4. At this point, I will lay out several pen nib units. At first, the nibs will be rotated in all different directions from the factory. The nib itself can be gently pulled out of the unit, rotated, and reinserted. The goal is to rotate each nib to the same position relative to the pen body.

5. I will rotate the first nib so that it is flat on the paper, and it will serve as the reference for each subsequent unit. Simply rotating each nib to what looks flat is not enough. I draw a reference plot that will reveal minor adjustments that need to be made. I'll fine-tune the nib for each unit and redraw the diagram to match the position exactly. Repositioning the nib when attached to the plotter is adequate; however, you will get inky fingers. Avoid using Bay State Blue ink here.

6. For each nib unit, I will repeat this bullseye drawing, looking for misalignment. If the nibs are not perfectly aligned, I will adjust the current one and redraw the diagram. I repeat this will every unit until they're all positioned in the same rotation.

7. After each nib is calibrated, I am ready to start plotting art. I will recalibrate them after a while because they seem to drift a bit from being used.

Other considerations

The sharp tip of a fountain pen will effortlessly glide across paper in all directions, at least for a single pass of color. Once ink saturated the fibers of the paper, though, subsequent passes may quickly tear through the media and draw right onto your table. Piter Pasma has documented a great solution for measuring the physical width of lines in order to properly space them.

Sidenote: Ballpoint pens do not have this problem and can overdraw without issue.

Fountain pens ideally operate at a 45 degree angle. The Axidraw (and modern Nextdraw) support this by default with their pen clip. Other pen plotters may need custom parts to accommodate this requirement.

Inks can be messy. It's an evergreen meme on r/fountainpens that people dye themselves blue with Bay State Blue Noodlers ink. Consider a dedicated working environment to contain the spills.

The other tools which I use:

• A cheap ultrasonic cleaner - This will break up dried ink in pens that have sat for a long time.
• A Bulb Syringe
• Syringes
• Small mixing vials
• Paperclips
• A swatch booklet

If you're interested in checking out my experiments with pen plotters, view them here.