What Is It?

The Isograph is an ink pen. Let’s get that out of the way to start with. There’s no disposable cartriges. You get the empty pens, and you get a bottle of ink. You have to put the one in the other…

Our Set

We bought the ‘isograph college set’, which came with three isograph pens (.50mm, .35mm and .25mm), a .5mm mechanical pencil, a bottle of ink, a pack of spare leads, an eraser, a compass adapter, and a template that doubles as the lid…

What’s it Like?

The isograph pens make a very solid black mark. The ink flows smoothly, and easily, as long as you don’t try to go too quickly. It’s very good at what it’s designed for – careful technical drawing – line drawings, diagrams, that sort of thing.

At first, I thought these would only be good for technical drawing, and no use for sketching, but I’m actually finding myself using them more and more for sketching. They work nicely in conjunction with either pencil or Watercolour. The ink is water proof, so you can draw with the Isographs, then paint colour over with your watercolours.

The ink flows quickly and smoothly, and can cover areas without any of the ‘scribbled’ look that most pens will give. You can fill in plain black sections in a way that you just can’t with any ballpoint or gel ink pen. The fine metal point can give an odd scratchy feel to drawing, though, and the .25mm tip can feel like drawing with a needle.

On thin paper (like in a Moleskine Notebook) the ink can leak through to the other side, and even to the next sheet.

Results

In the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing, these pens can do some amazing things…

• See Mike Budden’s drawing of St Peter’s Church in Chetnole, drawn with Isograph pens, as a tutorial in how to draw from a photograph – the final result is here.

Filling

The process of filling the pens with ink was less tricky than I expected – the ink bottle supplied has a very narrow neck, so you almost ‘inject’ the ink into the cartrige. Refilling seems to be easy enough too – just make sure you do it over some tissue or scrap paper in case of spillage.

Comparisons

Compare with lines from some other pens…

(Clicky piccy to see in Flickr in bigger sizes, and with notes and comments.)

Rotring Rapidoliner

The Rotring Rapidoliner was a kind of disposable version of the Isograph. The whole pen wasn’t disposable, but the refill extended right out of the top of the pen, so you replaced everything but the outside plastic sleeve and cap. Unfortunately, since Sanford bought Rotring, they’ve stopped making them.