Sorry for not posting earlier. Look out for an extra review tomorrow morning to make up for the week before last.
Normally, I tend to stay away from bigger tip sizes when it comes to drawing pens. As seen mainly in my obsession with the Staedtler Pigment Liner, I absolutely love micro-tip drawing pens. However, I wanted to stray a little out side my comfort zone and get something on the slightly bigger side. I got this opportunity during my spring quarter school supply shopping. I decided to get a slightly bigger 0.5mm tip size for the Kuretake Zig Cartoonist Mangaka Outline Pen (quite a mouthful, isn’t it?). After nearly a month in testing, I can safely say that I have yet to regret doing so.
Among drawing pens, this is one of the top picks on JetPens. It was highly rated and the reviews indicated that it was better received than it’s 0.3mm counterpart. The body is made of plastic, but it doesn’t feel very cheap. It pulls off what the Staedtler Pigment Liner does, except even better. The black body really makes the silver branding pop on the pen barrel.
The clip is standard and slightly flexible. It retains it shape very well and isn’t very easy to warp. In my pocket and pen case, it held up nicely and didn’t pop out at all. It performed its job admirably.
The grip is by far the best I’ve ever experienced on a drawing pen. It is smooth, unlike many of its competitors. The smooth transitions between the 3 layers of narrowing width allows for far more control than I’ve ever gotten from any drawing pen I’ve written with. It feels really assuring to know that I can be confident that it won’t slip despite the lack of any extra texture to help with grip. I used this pen for a 3 hour-long note-taking session and it held up to my expectations and then some. The ink is a water-based pigment ink that flows smoothly and is smudge-proof against watercolor and alcohol-based markers.
Reviewing this pen has been a blast! At every turn, it met my expectations and exceeded them in some aspects. Maybe I will try out the 0.3mm variant after finished with this one. If it feels anything like this one, I feel that I would have to edit my drawing pens rankings.
The Passionate Penman 