Breaking in a new fountain pen is one of the most satisfying experiences in art making. It starts as a stiff unrefined experience as the tines slowly begin to flex at a nearly imperceptable magnitude, and ink flows out onto the paper for the first time. It stops it and sputters the feed needs properly aligned. The fresh nib struggles to let the ink through the dry tines. You prime the converter and make an inky mess, and then it starts working the way you imagined it would. However, its still not perfect. You get out a fresh piece of scrap paper and start making lines. Those lines become a drawing and by the end of it you and the pen have an understanding.

and I can not fib.

This is my first drawing with my new Jinhao 159 with a medium #6 nib. It was interesting to see how much different my drawing looks with broader lines, and the medium nib made it much easier to fill in dark areas. In the future I will probably use it for outlines and filling in dark areas because it is far too heavy to use as a primary drawing implement. The pen is inked with Noodler’s Black Eel ink the same as my other pen.

I continued with the mushroom motif  from my last drawing. I expanded upon the emphasis on texture and line width variation that was present in my first drawing of mushrooms. After a while I may come back to this project and add some more elements.