30 August 26
A Crisis With the Kit
One of the hardest things about packing for a trip is to determine how little you can get away with in the article of art supplies. Both Numenius and I like to sketch in place, with the occasional drawing done after the fact from a photo. This means being nimble — your sketching stuff should be easy to pack and retrieve, light, and as comprehensive as possible.
Although fountain pens in planes can sometimes be disastrous, I’ve found the TWSBI brand loaded with DeAtramentis Document Ink to be very reliable. I like this ink because it’s waterproof: you can sketch in ink then lay in a watercolor wash over the drawing without having it run. The TWSBI Eco has a very large reservoir for ink which lasts a long time.
Unfortunately the TWSBI Diamond isn’t as large and though the nib is delicious on the paper I chose for this trip — Stillman and Birn Zeta — I managed to run out of ink in Tarragona before the trip was over. I’d been using a brown-black (“Sepia”) ink which is new to me from DeAtramentis. I still had a TWSBI Eco loaded with what I thought was Urban Gray, but which turned out to be black, which suddenly felt very harsh. (Stressing out about this kind of thing definitely falls under the category of First World Problems, of interest to maybe three people, but still.)
My attempt to remedy my predicament had us visit “the largest stationery store in Europe,” Raima, in Barcelona. I didn’t find ink there but I picked up a permanent brown marker. This turned out to be too light. We did find a nearby pen store that stocked ink (Platinum, also permanent for fountain pens), but there wasn’t the right brown, and did I really want to buy a whole bottle of ink before I got on a plane? I decided against it. Numenius lent me a Uniball Signo brown-black pen for the rest of the trip which was definitely close in color to what I wanted but I really do prefer to sketch in fountain pen… When we got home I gave my pens a new supply of ink.
You always learn something for the next trip. My favorite place to buy stationery supplies, on this continent, is JetPens, at least where fountain pens and inks are concerned.
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