I love the extra life and the shadow depth that a brush lends my work, but with that life comes a sensitivity to the faintest tremors in my hands that don’t even seem to exist when I’m using the tombows.
Here’s the same pencils, inked with the tombows, and then given a hurried color job.
My Series 7 has a split tip, which Mr. Jesse White, who extolled to me the virtues of the brush, has recently complained is increasingly a problem. So it may be I have a defective product. It may also be that I simply need a lot of practice to master the tool.
But! There is something else.
When I use the Tombows, I experience a sort of glee. I noticed it first when working on this piece, way back when I was testing the product:
I noticed it very intensely when I did the same piece first in Clip Studio Paint and then in paper:
I felt it with a previously unheard of intensity when I tried my first large image, using the wide-format printer/scanner.
And again, after mucking about with the Windsor and Newton Series 7 today, when I turned to re-ink the, again, large format picture, with my tombows.
I am not particularly better with these tools than with, say, the other brush pens I’ve used, or even other non-brush pens. But when I use them, it feels pleasant. It pleases me.
I suspect regardless of my lack of skill with a brush, that this is a tool meant for my hand.
