Review by Tina Koyama I have been known to look askance at and even mildly mock packaging that seems gratuitously fancy. And yet I’m the first to admit that I bought the entire original nine-volume (90-pencil) slipcased set of Tombow Irojiten Color Dictionary colored pencils for packaging alone. With most colored pencils, I like to…
Review by Tina Koyama Like many students, I could not have survived college without neon-colored highlighter markers. Since that time, I haven’t used highlighters nearly as much, but I still have occasional need for them in my planner, on receipts, in catalogs, and the like. While I’ve broadened my scope in most other stationery and…
Since all the Baron Fig writing tools I had seemed to coordinate so well, I decided to just review them altogether. The Archer Elements Pencil First, I’ll cover the newest item, the new Archer pencil release called Elements ($15 per dozen) which is a collaboration with Caroline Weaver from CW Pencil Enterprise. Like previous Baron Fig…
Loot Crate had an exclusive set of X-files pencils ($2.80) a few months back that featured quotes from the series. While I am not a subscriber of the pop culture box service, I was informed that it was fairly easy to grab a set on eBay so I scurried over and for less than $10,…
Review by Tina Koyama When the Tokyo Slider Twin Pencil Holder ($11.50) first came out, it caught my eye for several reasons. One is that conventional-size woodcased pencils are a little too slim for my comfort, and I experience less hand fatigue if I fatten the barrel with a holder. Another is that I have…
Review by Tina Koyama While woodcased colored pencils are commonplace (a quick search on Amazon resulted in 20,000 products!), colored leads for mechanical pencils or clutches are much harder to come by. They seem like they should be a promising idea – compact, refillable, no need for sharpening – and yet they generally aren’t. I’ve…
Review by Tina Koyama The only grease pencils I knew about were the white and black ones I’d seen in hardware stores. Recently a few of my urban sketcher friends shared sketches they had done with some kind of bright, opaque material on toned paper, and when I asked what they were using, the answer…
