Pen Talk: PenBBS 308

Today I want to talk about one of my favorite fountain pens I own: my PenBBS 308 in Hawaii. This was the first "expensive" pen I bought, which was around $40 on JetPens. (I found out later they were cheaper directly from the official PenBBS etsy page, but I wouldn't have found it from there, anyway.) Not my first fountain pen ever, but the first one that I intentionally sought out for it being a fountain pen, and the first pen I've spent over $10 on. 

My PenBBS 308 (left) and my PenBBS 456 (right). This photo is the most blue the color looks in just the right light. In a lot of lights, it leans sort of purple.

I'm going to throw in that I haven't edited the colors or added filters to any of these photos, but the colors will vary based on the lighting in the room at the time taken. The photo above had a lot of good sunlight coming in through the window at the time.

My Pen's Details:

• Colorway: Hawaii
  
• Default Nib: Steel F, Proprietary 
• Current Nib: Gold F, Proprietary
• Clip: Yes
• Postable: Yes, but long
• Fill Method: Converter or Eyedropper, currently Eyedropper
  

The pen I received from JetPens isn't the prettiest for this colorway. From photos I've seen of others online, the blue has a much more even spread with the yellow, and is more of a mid-range royal blue. Mine is mostly yellow with just bits of blue toward the bottom of the cap and the body. It doesn't blend as nicely as photos of others in my opinion.

The model photo from the JetPens store page. The blue reaches about midway on the body, and the whole image of the pen is brightly saturated. Or, at least, that's what JetPens wants you to see. 😉

 

I will say that while that's a bit disappointing, I still do enjoy the color overall, and this is a fairly minor complaint. I also know now that this is something you generally risk when you buy a resin pen online; most times if you're buying from an online store, you don't have the luxury of picking or seeing the exact pen you'll get. Something worth noting, since I eye-dropper fill this pen, is that the body is influenced by the color of the ink inside. Here's a photo of the pen filled with Sailor Studio 230, a bright red ink, which creates its own color effect in the body by fading the bright yellow to blue and turning it more purple. Similarly, if you put a dark blue in, it extends that dark blue area sort of how I wanted the actual body color anyway. 😅 So my initial disappointment has since been replaced by a "wow, this is pretty neat" feeling. 

When I first got this pen, I had trouble getting it to work. The problem was two-fold: one, I didn't realize the ink I'd ordered (Robert Oster Blue Moon) was a glitter calligraphy ink. I have a bad habit of scouring an online listing to make sure such-and-such is the right thing that I'm trying to order, and then somehow still messing it up and getting the wrong thing. Robert Oster does make fountain pen inks, but Blue Moon isn't really meant to go in a pen, and says so on the bottle. 😥 It also says so on the JetPens page but I missed it somehow. So when the pen jammed, I had no idea why, and multiple cleanings didn't really help. I've been reluctant to try shimmer in this pen ever since, though it might work with just the right ink. Maybe one day I'll find out.

The second problem was that, PenBBS pens in themselves are a bit quirky. Since, from what I understand, they're really meant for a Chinese audience in that they work best writing Chinese characters. I don't know much about Asian characters so I couldn't tell you why exactly this is, but to get them to work well for western letters, you just have to apply a bit of pressure. Youtuber Inkquiring Mind has a method he calls the "Seven Strokes of Happiness", where you effectively tweak the pen to your hand by holding the pen how you would write, and pressing down just a bit harder than you'd need for writing - spreading the tines just slightly - and moving the pen in a downward stroke. You don't want to do this too hard, since you may spring the tines and ruin your nib, but just slight pressure. You do this about seven times and your pen should be tuned to your hand. For me personally, since I have a pretty light hand, it takes closer to 15 to get the job done. But once it's done, the pen does work great. 

When I'm just looking for something random to write, I usually go with song lyrics, since I normally have something permanently blasting in my head. These are from the song Divisive by Disturbed. The ink here is Sailor Studio 230. And yeah my handwriting isn't anything great, but why make a post about a pen without a writing sample?

This pen is also sort of sentimental since it was my first pricey pen (and I am always highly biased in favor of the first thing I try, a trait of mine for some reason), so when I eventually ordered a pen directly from the PenBBS Etsy page, I ended up picking up a gold nib from them as well. Took a while to decide which pen to put it in, but it's in the 308, and I'm not inclined to remove it. The gold nib was worth it (it still needed the Seven Strokes treatment, but that's not a problem once you're aware of it), and this pen has moved up to a top favorite for me. It honestly just makes me happy to write with, and there's been a number of times where I'm using it and I just stop to think, dang I super like this pen. Wow. What a great pen.

A close-up of the 14k gold nib, which has two mirrored Chinese lion-dogs engraved into it, along with beautiful decorative designs.

My understanding is that PenBBS retired the 308 model, so if you're looking to get one, it might have to be second-hand. JetPens at the time of this writing still has some of the Lucky Koi colorway in stock (which is also very pretty), but it looks like JetPens may be getting rid of their PenBBS stock in general, so get it while you can. (I've been thinking about grabbing another myself but I really don't need one.)

I'll be talking about more individual pens going on, maybe in a random order, but I wanted to lead with this one since it was an early pen and I like it so much. I've already started writing up another post for another PenBBS I have, but will probably post something else before that one, as I'd like to mix up the brands a little bit. Maybe I'll go with one of my BENUs or a Fine Writing International pen or something.

Hobby Intro: Fountain Pen Collecting

At the moment, I'm expecting a good number of my posts to be about fountain pens. It's one of my newest hobbies, as I've been collecting for... a year? And a half, maybe? I'm actually testing out writing these blog posts out in pen first, to help give me an idea of where I want to go. It's very easy for me to over-edit text and spend way too long on it, and I'm finding this is more succinct. (I want to try writing my comic script rough drafts this way next, but still working out how I want to do that exactly.) Anyway, so far this is nice. 

My collection so far is twenty pens. Here's a list: 

• PenBBS 308, Hawaii
• PenBBS 456, Autumn
• PenBBS 495, Fairyland
  
• Pilot Petit1, Clear Blue (x2)
• Pilot Metropolitan, Red
• Pilot Prera, Parrot Green
• BENU Briolette, Luminous Blue
• BENU Talisman, Peacock Ore
• BENU Euphoria, Early Bird
• Opus 88 Koloro, Blue
• Opus 88 Mini, Busy Bee
  
• Nahvular (Narwhal) Nautilus, Macaw
• Sailor Pro Gear Slim (x2)
• Nekoyanagi & Haha
• Pillow Book
• Fine Writing International Wheel Of Time, Autumn
• Fine Writing International Demonstrator
• Monomi Olika, Orange
• Fountain Pen Revolution, Jaipur V2
• Retro 51 Tornado
• Edison Beaumont, Unicorn

Most of my fountain pens, including the disposables.

When I buy pens, I look for a few things. As you might be able to tell from the picture, I really like colorful pens, so the colors and overall look of the pen are definitely a factor. If I'm going to get into buying expensive writing tools, I might as well get ones that make me happy to look at. 😊 I've seen some people on the fountain pen Reddit call pens like the BENUs "gaudy", but it makes me think of when I played Flight Rising and everyone mostly collected small lairs of white, black, and gold dragons... and then I had a huge of all sorts of bright colors, called "eyeburners" by the community. This is who I am and I'm fine with it. 

The rest of my collection.

I try to get something "new" almost every time I buy. Very rarely do I get the same thing for the same experience again; I usually aim for something different out of a purchase, like the model, the nib, the nib size, the fill system, etc. I like the tinkering aspect of fountain pens where you can make small changes to see how the pens write, or how the ink behaves, etc. There's been maybe twice where I bought another pen because I wanted the same or similar experience to a pen I already had, but usually I try to change something about a new purchase so I can compare to what I already have. I've been enjoying learning how the pens work and making what adjustments I can as a beginner and seeing how it changes things. For example, some inks behave differently in different pens.

Since I work as a software developer, I don't spend a ton of time writing anymore. It's only been over the last handful of years that I've started seeking it out, and what I've found is that writing... hurts. My grip seems fine and I don't ever remember having trouble in school with writing for long periods, but now I can't do it without getting sore and cramping up my hand. Drawing doesn't do this, I've just gotten worse at writing specifically since leaving high school, and my handwriting has deteriorated along with it. I've been re-teaching myself cursive and practicing, as it turns out I thought I still remembered cursive, but I didn't. So the last year I've been getting better, my handwriting has improved significantly from the practice, and I'm working on loosening my grip and trying to suss out what I'm doing that's making it hurt.

Another thing is that, this is effectively a new art medium for me. From talking with a friend who's been into fountain pens for a long time, she gave me the idea to touch up my drawings with a water brush. It's sort of an easy, cheater watercolor painting thing, which is a lot of fun to do. I often have to start from scratch every time I watercolor (in terms of remembering how to do it), but a lot of fountain pen inks will spread easily with water, and there's a lot less technique needed to make something fun. Usually  just doodles right now, but I've just picked up my first "permanent" black ink, and am hoping to do some fun things with it. :) I may share some pictures of what I've been drawing here, but I often share them on mastodon too. 

But that's all for now! I'll probably do individual posts of my pens and inks later on. Not so much "reviews" as it is just my own experiences, since I'm not really going to make recommendations or anything, I guess. Just show how I use things and what I like about them, personally. (That might count as a review?) But that's later. I'm aiming for about one blog post a week, but that's not a strict schedule, as I don't want this to be something where I feel pressured to maintain anything - I just want to chat when I'm feeling up to it. So yeah, that's that! Talk to you all later!

Hello World

Hello, everyone! I've been thinking about starting up a blog for a while, and wrote up a blog post so figured I would go ahead and make it. The point of this blog is just a place for me to talk about my hobbies - just whatever is interesting me at the moment, whatever that may be. The old-school blog format is very appealing to me as a laid-back, relaxing way to share. I went back and forth on whether I'd want to make a hobby youtube channel, but I'm afraid that will be too intense for what I really want this to be. I don't want to get caught up in editing, or feeling like I need to post certain things to "stay relevant" or post "new content" or anything. 

Since this is my first post, maybe I'll introduce myself? I'm Emily (or SunScales), I'm in my 30s, I'm a software developer who works in C#, and I live with my boyfriend Dane. I've been making a webcomic for the last 10+ years. I like video games, drawing, painting, reading... I try to stay active by skating, biking, and hitting the gym. I like to pick up new hobbies and interests, then move onto something else after... maybe six months or a year or whatever, haha. So I guess this blog is going to be one of those. :) 

Like I said, my goal with this blog isn't a specific topic, but more as a general hobby blog. I'd love to one day move this to my webcomic site, but at this point, I don't know if I'll ever finish coding it. But the idea is, as I pick up new interests, I like to talk about them! But I don't need to bore everyone with all the new things I pick up. So this will be the place, ideally with tags and all that, where I can just share what I'm interested in in detail. That way I get to gush about my new obsession and move on later, haha. I do already share thigns on social media, of course, but I'm no longer on twitter (which, I will continue to call it that). Currently I post on mastodon, and I'm able to tag and use the content warning feature to hide specific things that I think might take up a bit too much space on peoples' feeds. But I like the idea of this blog as being my little corner that I can just link to and share, and then maybe I can find it later if I want to see it again. 

Some of the topics that I think I'm going to be starting with are fountain pens. I have a fairly small collection of pens and a bunch of inks, so I could write about them and share my thoughts and some ink swatches. I started collecting fountain pens maybe a year or so ago and have been working on improving my hand writing a bit (sort of). Maybe some video game stuff like The Sims 4, since that's fun to talk about. There's also digimon cards, which I had been playing at my local hobby shop, but haven't had time to do in a while - hoping to get back into it this year. And maybe some sporty stuff - I have some cute rollerblades, though it's winter now (Happy New Year, actually!) so I won't be getting back into that until the spring. 

But yeah! That's the idea at the moment. Maybe I'll see you around, if I actually keep up with this blog. Otherwise you can find me on Mastodon (my main account is @SunScales@ComicsCamp.club). That's the best way to get a hold of me these days.