Second-Hand Goodness!

I just adore art and writing supplies. I love their touch, all the distinctive smells (the way the Japanese manga ink or freshly sharpened cedar-wood pencils smell!), and the beautiful colors of inks and pigments suggesting unlimited creative possibilities bound within them.
I love researching, getting new tools, and arranging them into small sets that fit and work nicely together. I even treasure cleaning art tools, fixing them, and modifying them to match my artistic needs.

Looking at how many of my favorite artists work, I recognize and understand that the tools used don’t have to be of the ultimate quality, expensive, or rare to create exceptional art and be well-matched to the task at hand.
It seems that the “matching feeling” is the most important aspect – in my experience, a great tool works just right, feels great in hand, and when needed, “disappears,” completely getting out of the way, letting the process flow, and can even help a lot to energize and inspire the creative spirit.
Somehow, great tools just beg to be picked up and used. They make creating art that bit more pleasurable and fun, so for me, they can serve as one of the methods of keeping myself content with everyday work – a trick I learned from other creative people too (Neil Gaiman talked about his favorite fountain pens that work like that for him in this interview, for example).

It’s easy to understand then that when I first came to Japan and started to visit all the art supplies stores packed with art-making gear, I wanted to try everything! All the crayons, markers, brush-tipped pens, and mechanical pencils were singing to me about what would be possible if I just bought one more. I tried to limit myself to tools that actually looked like they could help me with what I had in mind for my art, but still, a few years later, when I was moving to Tokyo, I found that I had boxes and boxes of stuff that I did not use at all – what a sad sight indeed!

Since then, I stopped impulse-buying. I tried to distribute some unused tools to my art friends, but still, a lot of what was left was plastic, single-use items that had already managed to get bone-dry and had to be thrown away – an even more painful thing to do for me! I promised myself I would be more conscious about what I buy, why, and where. I adopted a more minimalistic approach to my tools.

After all, after years of experimenting, my toolset became very simple and does not change at all:

• pencils for sketching,
• fountain pens and ballpoint pens for drawing lines,
• watercolors for coloring.

Even if I test some new tools on the way, I always somehow come back to these basics.
I stopped buying cheap and single-use tools in favor of ones well made of durable materials that can be reused, refilled, and repaired easily – tools that will last for years.

But what’s most important, I also aim for tools that will give me the long-term joy of use and win with this short-lasting dopamine hit of buying a cheap but cool disposable pen, testing it once or twice, and forgetting it immediately. In other words, I want a pen or a pencil I will be happy to hold in my hand every day for many coming years of work – again, it’s more about the pleasure of using the tool, its sustainability, and how well it “matches” the work and not about just how expensive, rare or cool and fancy it is.

To reduce waste and find the tools I could not afford otherwise, I started extensively using the second-hand market service called Mercari. Right now, almost half of the tools I use as my daily drivers I have bought second-hand, and I also use this service a lot to try to sell things I don’t need instead of just forgetting them or throwing them away.

Actually, I noticed that for some years now, one of my dreams of the “if I had more time and money” type that has stuck in the back of my head is to open a second-hand art supplies store (or a mobile truck one – like a mobile library). A beautifully wooden, magic- or old Paris-like store that would buy used or not needed any more art supplies, recondition and sort them, and then sell them cheaper so there’s less waste, and more artists can afford nicer tools. For example, I could buy a set of watercolors that only had two colors used and then sell all the other tubes separately, then maybe sell the tin box after cleaning and re-painting it, too. I understand why such shops are a rarity even in a massive city like Tokyo – the expertise needed to run one and the dangers of re-selling used supplies are great, especially in the art world – who would like an angry painter coming back and demanding compensation for second-hand paint that did not work exactly as they were expecting – but I would love a big shop like that to frequent.

For now, I can hunt for and sell art tools online; there are a lot that make excellent second-hand purchases:

• Ballpoint and rollerball pens – as these pens rely on cartridges that also replace the “business” end of the pen entirely, often use standardized refills, and are usually less in demand than fountain pens, it’s easy to find a very nice one for drawing. It’s also possible to adapt and convert refills to a type I would like to use for drawing, even if the original ones are not good for it at all.
• Color and graphite pencils – are relatively safe purchases and appear A LOT on second-hand websites – I guess many people just can not help themselves from buying a beautiful tin can full of colors and then using just one or two.
• Mechanical pencils and lead holders – the most well-known brands, made of metal or the nicer ones for technical drawing, are a neat second-hand purchase. I use a Parker 0.9mm pencil from, I think, the 1960s that I found online, and I like it a lot. It’s best to buy pencils that use popular lead sizes, though – some can use weird thicknesses that limit the choices – 0.3, 0.5, 0.7, 0.9, and 2.0mm offer a lot of flexibility!
• Isograph-like technical pens like the Rotring ISOGRAPH or Faber-Castell TG1-S, which just take ink and not special cartridges, are a nice buy, too! In my experience, some drafting and technical drawing tools were made to higher standards when they were popular thirty or so years ago. I use some technical pens made in West Germany that are better than the ones I can buy in stores now. However, these pens are clog-prone and often used with waterproof inks, so I look for ones marked as new-old-stock.

• Parts! – It can be surprisingly cheap and convenient to buy parts for broken tools. That tip for a technical pen from the 1980s, or the pointy tip (lead sleeve it’s called, or 口金 – “mouth steel” in Japan) for a favorite mechanical pencil? – I always check online before giving up on a tool! In the same way, it may be good to sell broken tools, too – maybe someone will use just the cap from that broken pen and make things last longer this way!

However, there are some supplies I’m more careful about buying, and I often go for new ones:

• Paper supplies, especially if I plan to use them with paints or inks (like fountain pens). Sizing – the coating that helps paper handle water can get bad over time and make the paper unusable for painting. Things like pencil sketching or drawing with a ballpoint pen will still work well, though.
• Fountain pens – it might seem a great deal to be able to buy a nice pen cheaper, or an old-style one that is not available new anymore (like all those with fancy, flexible nibs) – but as nibs can get damaged easily and are in most cases not easily replaceable I personally prefer going to a store specializing in such tools, to try them out before buying, or get them adjusted on the spot if needed. The exception here for me are fountain pens that can be easily repaired even if the nib turns out unusable, like the LAMY Safari or Al-Star lines, for example.
• Obviously, I try to avoid non-refillable pens or ones requiring weird proprietary cartridges. Some can still be reused with a bit of DIY work, but I’m always careful. If I was making art with a lot of single-use tools, then maybe I would have been tempted to buy more of those second-hand too (like markers or fineliners) to not feel so bad about throwing them away when the ink runs out, but I avoid these in the first place.

Here are only some examples of my everyday tools I got second-hand:

• Gold-colored LAMY Lx fountain pen I got second-hand online.
• Faber Castell and Rotring technical pens made in West Germany (30 years old?).
• Montblanc and Parker rollerball and ballpoint pens that look and feel great that I managed to find for real bargain prices and now use daily for drawing and sketching.
• Old Parker 0.9mm mechanical pencil with a weird clutch mechanism.

All these old tools work excellently and serve me well in my everyday work. It makes me happy and my workday more pleasurable to take them out also because I like to imagine how they were rescued from someone else’s “unused tools” box or saved from being thrown away. A huge win-win for everyone!