Novelty Pen 7 – Not a Pen

This Novelty Pen series pen isn’t technically a pen. It’s pencil leads.

These are 2mm coloured mechanical pencil leads. I have a 2mm mechanical pencil, and it’s easy enough to press the end and slide out the lead, then press the end and slide in another one.

2mm is a thick lead. It’s thick! Here’s the 2mm against a standard 0.5mm lead, for reference.

The leads in the little pack that I got from AliExpress weren’t in rainbow order, so I had to take them out and re-order them, obviously. A couple of them were broken, but that isn’t really a big deal with mechanical pencils.

Swatching was simple. The colours were nice, but they aren’t as pigmented as I’d like.

I drew a little monster, and then decided its eyes needed to be black so when I coloured him I changed that up.

And then for my final piece I knew I needed a rainbow monster.

I used my standard graphite 2mm lead to sketch out, and a normal inking pen to outline. Colouring was okay. It got a little frustrating to take each lead out and put a new one in everytime I wanted to change colours. I guess you could get a whole bunch of mechanical pencils and put one colour in each, but that seems a little pointless. You might as well buy a pack of coloured pencils.

But they coloured okay, and I ended up with a really cute little monster that may well end up being one of my Follow Up monsters one day.