Have you been out today?

No great surprise this one.

I've been using these fibre tip pens for many years now and although I play fast and loose with other models (Pitt artist pens, Pentel brush pens, Staedtler pigment liners...) from time to time these are still the staple tool of much of my work. Specifically I normally favour the 0.3 model (as worked to death in the original Life Of A Pen project). There's a lush rich blackness to the line they produce when they're brand new but I prefer them when they're just beginning to dry out a fraction and give a little more variation and texture to the marks they make, especially when used on, say, the 300gsm hot pressed watercolour paper of a John Purcell Paper sketchbook.

Mmmm. Ooh, that's good.