J. Herbin Creapen Refillable Paintbrush Review

Thanks Karen and Stephanie! After returning from my week-long trip to North Carolina, I found the box of Exaclair review samples waiting for me. Given my fondness for sketching with brush pens, I tried the J. Herbin Creapen refillable paintbrush first and shot a couple of short videos of the initial doodle tests for this review.
The Creapen brush pen comes packaged with 3 black ink refill cartridges. It first caught my eye when I spotted it among the new Jet Pens arrivals a few weeks ago.
This French product would be the first brush pen in my collection that was not made in Japan, so I was quite curious to test how well it worked.
Given their thin plastic construction, the components can feel rather delicate. Thus I would recommend exercising due caution when assembling the pen or changing an ink cartridge. Mindful not to over tighten the barrel to the pen nib, I also made sure the cartridge and the pen brush nib were properly aligned before firmly pushing them together. I feared excessive force or a careless fit might had easily damaged the slender cartridge port.
This brush pen is very light weight, so that should reduce fatigue when writing or drawing for long periods with it.
To get the ink flow started after attaching an ink cartridge to the brush nib for the first time, I shook the pen several times with the nib pointing down and left it in a pencil cup while I watched some tv. Which proved to be a bit too long, since a good amount of ink ended up leaking and pooling inside the pen cap. In general, I tend to store all my brush pens horizontally once the brush nibs are loaded with ink. After cleaning up the mess with a shop towel, I tested the Creapen on 24 lb Xerox bright yellow paper and some 110 lb Georgia Pacific white card stock I had lying around. The brush nib glided smoothly on both supports and felt quite soft allowing for good variation in line thickness. It felt softer and more flexible than my old Pentel Pocket brush pen and quite similar to my Platinum and Kuretake brush pens.
To test the ink's water resistance, some tap water was ran over this test doodle after it had dried for a few minutes. The sketched outlines retained their sharp edges, and the water did not seem able to disturb the integrity of the brushstrokes at all.
Since the Creapen ink dried quickly, the sketched outlines could be easily colored with watercolors without the black ink bleeding into the lighter unpainted areas. Thus this brush pen should partner well with a variety of water soluble coloring tools.
Given the J. Herbin Creapen promising initial performance as a sketching tool, I plan to continue testing it on other paper supports and in my field kit. Brush pen users that value water resistant inks would likely enjoy adding it to their collections. The refill cartridges 4-packs are also available in blue, green, brown, and purple inks. A few more Creapen sample doodles:Moleskine planner paper is a fairly smooth off-white support, but it tends to absorb too much ink that is fairly visible through the back of the page.Rhodia dotPad paper is a smooth support with a signature unobtrusive dot matrix to help guide placement of type and graphic elements within each page. Minimal see-through the back of the page.
Clairefontaine Triomphe blank paper is a super smooth ultra white support. Ink dries quickly on top of the paper and features minimal see-trough the back of the page.