I’m continuing my adventure with the D1 ballpoint pen refills and ways to use them for drawing and sketching.
Well, this is all very nice, but what if someone would like to try making art with all these fancy ballpoint pen refills without buying an expensive Italian-made pen or spending hours in an office supplies store trying to look for the least-rattly one?
There is one more interesting hack-like solution to this – using a clutch pencil (or a lead holder as these are called in Japan).
Recently, for a completely unrelated reason, I started to use lead holders for my everyday drawing more and more and got very fond of them by trying leads of various brands and finding ones that worked just right for my art style. Somewhere during that research, I discovered that apart from the most popular 2mm lead holders, the Czech Republic’s famous Koh-I-Noor brand also makes much rarer 2.5mm ones! This is very interesting for our purposes because the D1 standard ballpoint refills are around 2.3mm thick, so these lead holders could be ideal ballpoint pens too!
Koh-I-Noor-made art tools are common in Poland, so I asked my parents to send me a few of the pencils in a letter, but ask around – maybe you, too, have a friend living in Prague who can be convinced to go on a walk to the Koh-I-Noor flagship store. A few weeks ago, the letter came in, and I was able to put some ballpoint-pen refill hacked clutch pencils into my everyday sketching set and tested them out.
The results were very promising! Not only it’s effortless and fast to change the refills (just press the button, and the refill falls right out), but also, as these holders were originally developed for technical drawing and professional art making, the clutch mechanism grips the tip of the refill very securely and with no play at all.
I was a bit worried about how resistant the refill would be to being pressed hard onto the paper surface – would it slip and sink into the pen? But I tried to press quite hard, and it would not budge – I would crush the point of a regular pencil lead with the force I had to apply to actually make the refill slip.
Combined with something like the SCHMIDT 635 M or LAMY M21 refill, this tool starts to feel like a true hybrid between a ballpoint pen and a pencil – great for doodling, sketching, and even using with watercolors.
Koh-I-Noor sells two kinds of 2.5mm clutch pencils (with the difference being only in the colors as far as I can tell): the Versatil 5905 and 5205, which can be bought very inexpensively for about 6,50 Euro (7USD) with or without the clip.
Now, as it’s finally getting warm in Japan and the cherry trees are about to start blossoming, I’m looking forward to trying to use these outside, too, for now, I made a sketch from a photo:
Art vs. Entropy 
No i fajnie!
Rzeczywiście te oprawki są dostępne, ale wkłady iso już znacznie gorzej..Widziałem pakowane po dwa za 12zł z niezanej firmy ” Montezuma”.
U mnie do codziennego pisania idzie “długopis w gwiazdki” od polskiej TOMY. Ma świetną końcówkę 0.6mm i kosztuje 3.7zl. Niestety trudno dostać dobre wkłady do niego, więc trzeba kupić ok. 5 na raz, bo mają mało tuszu (ok. 4 tyg. codziennego pisania z wykresami i wzorami).
Na zapas miała być nieśmiertelna podróba wkładu parkera czyli Zenit, ale po używaniu gwiazdki jest to mocne obniżenie jakości, bo linia grubsza, tusz bardziej gęsty i po odłożeniu trzeba go rozpisywać. Ktoś mi powiedział że wydał 22zł na wklad parkera, który mu wyciekał, czyli
“Nie ma świętości na tym świecie…” !
Wymienione oprawki koh i noor nie mają gumowej nasadki i przy mocnym ściskaniu na początku bolą mnie palce.
Ostatnio moi koledzy zaczęli robić notatki piórami wiecznymi, więc w natarciu jest Lama safari u koleżanki i srebrny Parker u kolegi. Dla mnie to zawsze jest za gruba linia i jak trzeba opisać osie na wykresie i jednocześnie szybka notatka, to robi się mało czytelnie. Wymagana jest mentalna kompresja treści przed zapisem, czego ja nie umiem, no i koledze ciągle wycieka pióro (koleżanki boję się pytać).
Obok siedzą koledzy robiący notatki rysikiem na tablecie, czyli “pełen cyberpunk”, ale widziałem że nie udaje im się wszystkiego zapisać i narysować na czas..
Co Pan sądzi o kolorowych wkładach do takich oprawek ?
Pozdr
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Wkłady normalne, ołówkowe mają ten plus że jest ich może z kilkanaście rodzai od różnych firm i można potestować i znaleźć takie które pasują, niestety kolorowych jest trochę mniej a że nie używam kredek nie testowałem w ogóle.
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Jeszcze zdarzało mi się używać tej oprawki z wykałaczką w środku jako duży rysik do nintendo ds (duża dłoń) i ze zużytym wkładem jako rylec do rowków w tekturze np. przy składaniu origami i reliefach…
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Clutch pencils are great. I was always a big fan of them because they were after all the type of pencils that I’ve used to use during my student days. And yes.. they can hold all about everything including ball point refills, colour pencil leads or refills and even erasers if you use the 5.6 mm ones.
The 5,6 mm clutch pencils can even work as a replacement for dip pen holders if you add a tiny piece of wood on the base of the nib that you want to attach on the clutch pencil.
I’ve used one of my clutch pencils for something different though.
As I’ve told you the other day on Youtube, you’ve saved my painting life by suggesting the BIC evolution pencils on one of your videos. They produce the kind of graphite lines that I need for my botanical illustrations.
But these pencils are quite tricky to sharpen as their leads tend to break easily into sharpeners and it is also very tricky to sharpen them with a craft knife. It is very easy to shave instead of the wood the graphite probably because their graphite leads are made with resin instead of clay. So I’ve sliced one of these pencils open, I’ve removed the graphite and placed it into one of my clutch pencils, my retro 1990 Rotring PS 2 one that could hold the somewhat thicker graphite lead of the Bic pencils.
And that is how I’ve solved the problem of sharpening them!
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