Kuretake No. 55 Double Sided Brush Pen - Hard & Soft

Better than the American version of the Tombow brush pen by a mile. Good pen for sketching. The soft brush makes it a little slow for fast caricature work though.

I owe Jetpens my reviews...
This brush marker is great for on-the-go sketching, a perfect pocket brush. It's not fine nor delicate, there's no fear of mashing it against the paper, of really abusing it, pushing limits. I have a lot of fun with the brush side of the marker, it was the first of the Kuretake's that I tried but have since switched over to the No.33 and No.6 since the hard marker is pretty useless to me. It bleeds a different ink than the soft side, separates into blue and grey when exposed to water. It's so hard that it skips and splashes a bit too. I most use it to write myself notes, or I give it to my 3-yr-old to use...

The key things to know here are that (A) the soft brush is huge--don't plan to do any detailed line drawings with it--but gives a good range of line width and is fairly responsive to pressure, (B) the hard brush gives a fine line but is not good for varying line width because, well, it's HARD! (The hard brush has basically two line widths: "light touch" and "mashing it into the paper.")

I can't make a recent comparison, but I think the Pentel/Platinum brush size is better for drawing, and I'm wondering if Kuretake makes a smaller soft brush. (My ideal would have been a medium soft brush + a fine soft brush, neither of which this pen offers. Oh well. The pen is great for someone who knows what they're getting!)