My Go-To Gel Pens and Fountain Pens

Pens are small but mighty tools. We use them to jot quick and trashable notes, to list our daily tasks and to-do’s, write to friends and family, and even to document our innermost thoughts and dreams!

Here are few of my favorites for doing all the above.

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Gel Pens

• Pilot G2 Gel Pen in 0.38mm or 0.5mm
  A classic, a favorite, an icon. There’s a reason this pen is everywhere. Reliable, inexpensive, just the right amount of juicy. Definitely a smearer, though — so just not my favorite for Tomoe River paper aka my Hobonichi books.

• Zebra Sarasa Dry 0.4mm
  The ink in this pen is to paper what warm cinnamon rolls are to our taste buds: delicious. This pen is super easy and comfortable to write with and the ink is inky (but not too inky), smooth and dries quickly. Since it’s a standard gel pen, you can swap the ink into different pen bodies of the same mm size, and vice versa. For a while, I liked using the Energel Clena pen body with the Sarasa Dry ink… and vice versa. Obsessive? Sure, maybe. The light purple body is my favorite right now. Lavender Haze, plz.

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Fountain Pens

A fountain pen is a pen that has a separate nib and separate reservoir of ink. The pen draws ink from the reservoir through a feed to the nib. The ink travels by a combination of gravity and capillary action (i.e. cohesion, adhesion, and surface tension working together). Different shapes and styles of nibs can change the amount of ink distributed and the thickness of your writing line. Most fountain pens have replaceable nibs, come in different materials and styles from Extra-Fine to Extra Broad.