The Daiso Fluently illustration marker showed up at my local Daiso, everyone’s favourite Japanese dollar store, a few months ago.
They’re alcohol-ink markers packaged in ten sets of two, for nineteen colors total and a blender marker. My store was only carrying three or four of the sets, so I just grabbed a pair of greens and a pair of greys to try out.
Initial marker tests for light green, green, light cool grey, and light warm grey.
Emerald City Comicon often has art supply distributors and vendors in their Exhibits Hall. Sometimes, these vendors will go through Artist Alley during pre-opening hours, passing out sample supplies and coupons to artists. I always intend to thoroughly test these samples and review them, since it’s rare I get the opportunity to test product I didn’t specifically pick out.
Well, it’s been three years since I’ve been in ECCC’s Artist Alley (and no one thinks to leave art supplies for Homegrown artists), and I’m finally dusting off these Marvy Le Plume alcohol-ink markers for review, lol.
I have two colors of the regular Le Plume, a dark grey (CG897) and a medium blue (B717). I also have a Le Plume “fine brush” in a light skin tone color (OR825). Marvy now also has a newer line of Le Plume II markers, but these are not those!
Most brush pens only come in black. Occasionally, they also come in grey, but very rarely are there any additional colors.
My favourite brush pen, the Pentel pocket brush, only has black cartridge inks available. A few years ago, when I picked up a new Pentel pocket brush for a fresh tip, I decided to syringe-fill the old one with grey ink (specifically J. Herbin’s Gris Nuage). This was a great decision, and I’ve really enjoyed being able to use my fav pen to add value to drawings in addition to making the lines.
More recently, Pentel decided to release five limited edition versions of the pocket brush with different colored pen bodies. Alas, they’ve found my weakness… collectibles and colors.
The limited edition (LE) camellia Pentel pocket brush
My local Daiso has stocked Zebra brush pens pretty regularly for a while now, and it’s usually where I load up on the Zebra super fines I like so much. While I was in Richmond, BC, though, I stopped by their monstrous two-story Daiso and saw some pens I hadn’t seen before, including this mysterious Zebra one.
Searching around later, it seems this is the Zebra “Usu-Zumi” brush pen (P-WF1-GR), which is confusingly labeled “black” in most places, despite actually being a grey ink pen.
The pen doesn’t seem widely available online, and when it is, it’s usually bundled with the other Zebra brush pens or priced anywhere between $3 and $8 as a single pen, so Daiso’s $1.50 price ($2.00 CAD) was a great deal.
So the Ooly Splendid Pen is apparently just a repackaged version of the Monami Olika fountain pen, but the latter comes in more default color options and has an extra fine nib available in addition to the fine.
The Ooly pen was impressive for the $5-6 price point and since the Monami is priced the same, I picked up a Monami with the EF nib in black. A neutral color would give the pen more use cases for me, and I wanted to see if the EF nib was as good as the F.
Spoilers: It is. This pen is wonderful.
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