Sometimes not following directions can be beautiful.
I am always excited to try a new tool or approach to creating letter-forms – some are easy to master, others take lots of practice or experimentation. When I first picked up a set of Pilot’s Parallel Calligraphy pens I could tell they had put a lot of effort into creating an affordable tool that was easy to use. What I didn’t expect was how that same tool would produce such incredible line quality, consistent ink flow and make cleanup and ink changes effortless.
The pens come in 4 sizes (1.5mm/2.4mm/3.8mm/6.0mm) and use a 0.8oz pilot cartridge for ink. Pilot offers a range of cartridge colors (Black, Blue Black, Sepia, Violet, Blue, Turquoise, Green, Light Green, Yellow, Orange, Red, and Pink) but you can use an ink syringe to add your favorite ink to the pen with some caveats. The specially formulated inks from Pilot flow beautifully in all the pens, but what you may notice is the 6.0mm nib is a bit picky about other inks. I have found some inks can flow a little slower and the resulting lines may not quite match your color expectations as the ink flow is less than what you get from a dip pen or steel brush tip. Dropping down to the 3.8mm seems to remedy the problem for most inks but it is still something to keep in mind when deciding on line weight and color for your project.
After playing with the pens for a while I started looking at how to get different effects from the pen. I liked the look achieved by a folded pen nib which runs roughly 90 degrees to the surface. The greater tension at this angle and changing contact area create some fantastic line variations. Holding the 6.0mm Pilot at this angle revealed the need for a few things. Pilot uses small notches in the tip surface to allow ink to flow across the entire nib evenly, but they can hang up on rough paper when holding it at such an extreme angle. The remedy is simply working with a smooth ink/marker/mixed media 
paper to provide as smooth a surface as possible. The other issue was pressure – these tips weren’t really meant to be pushed at this angle either so you need to find the sweet spot for your paper/ink when playing with this approach. The pictures here show how I usually work with a new combination of inks and paper looking for the sweet spot. Some of the lines in the picture are too heavy (W) due to pushing too hard while others are a little light (O). Also be ready for some ink spatter as the nib will shed ink when it hits a snag and releases – I like the effect but keep anything you don’t want covered in ink spatter away from your work area.
I have just started experimenting with them at this point but they are a lot of fun to play with and the results are pretty cool. If you can’t afford the whole set of 4 right away I would highly suggest starting with the 3.8mm or 6.0mm as the smaller tips don’t allow for as much variation if you want to play with this effect. For the example shown I was using Noodler’s Heart of Darkness in the 6.0mm pen and Noodler’s Eel Blue in the 3.8mm pen, the paper is Strathmore’s 400 series Mixed Media pad.
