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.

New Derwent Watercolour Pencils compared to the original Rexel Derwent version

My oldest (customized set of 27) and newest (set of 12) lithographed tin sets of Derwent Watercolour pencils are shown above. According to a sticker on the label, the new version features softer leads. There was another version between them with light blue/turquoise barrels, but I gave those to my nieces a while back. Watercolor pencils are quite convenient sketching and coloring tools that can be used dry just like conventional wooden colored pencils with the added advantage that their marks can be partially dissolved with water using a brush or waterbrush. For further tips on their potential uses and applications, I would recommend checking out Cathy Johnson's books.The new pencils have dark blue barrels with a small color coding on one end. I would really prefer the color coding to extend over the entire length of the pencil barrel for faster color selection as it was done for the special 36 pencil edition commemorating the 50th anniversary of the introduction of this watercolor pencil line back in 1953.
Decided to make a color chart comparing both watercolor pencil versions since both sets included the same selection of 12 colors.
The softer leads of the new pencils crumbled easily while making this reference marks chart.
Fresh out of their sealed tin, some of the pencil points broke off during their initial testing. Once sharpened, they seemed to crumble less.
After shaking off the lead debris, got this dry color swatch chart. The old watercolor pencils felt drier and yielded swatches with more specks of white paper showing through while the new watercolor pencil swatches looked more saturated given their thicker coverage. The hues' names, color coding, and appearance have remained quite consistent across time.
The dry color swatches of both watercolor pencil versions behaved identically when blended with a waterbrush. The clean loaded waterbrush was passed over the left side of each color swatch three times and then dragged further to the left to spread the color wash on to the uncolored paper.
Colors looked brighter when the dry pigment was dissolved with the aid of a waterbrush.
Added some decorative background elements using Derwent Graphitint pencils and the trusty waterbrush. The latest version of Derwent Watercolour pencils remains a pretty good color match to the original water soluble pencils (which can still be found in open stock at some outlets). While the new softer leads have a tendency to crumble under heavy pressure, they allow for quick lay down of thick layers of color that can be readily manipulated with a brush loaded with water. Simply exercise due care by transporting and storing them in their protective tins or canvas wrap. Recommended addition to field sketching kits: Derwent Watercolour pencils are versatile and reliable coloring tools with widespread distribution, so it is quite simple to find refill pencils and new colors to maintain your sets or customize your palette.