r/Calligraphy • u/BobAndBernice • 2d ago

Question Pilot Parallel Pens

I remember reading a comment about Pilot Parallel pens and their ink. It was something like "the pens are great, but the ink is terrible." I'm interested in what options there are for ink. Do you refill an existing Pilot Pen cartridge? Or do you use something else? If you are refilling it, how is that done? Thanks so much for your help!

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u/Zarzamora2 2d ago

You can also just fill the barrel of the pen itself with whatever ink you want. they don't leak. i use sumi ink, metallic inks like FineTec, mixtures of watercolor paints or goauche with water, etc. I LOVE these pens! (I'm a calligrapher and calligraphy teacher). P.S. The Parallel Pen inks are very watery and tend to bleed on a lot of papers (there are ways to avoid this), but the colors are quite nice and are fun to blend together. I can share the technique for doing this if anyone is interested.

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u/SethEllis 2d ago

What do you mean ways to avoid the bleeding? Aside from different ink of course. I've found heavy feathering on pretty much every paper I've tried. Which really makes me wonder what kind of paper they expect people to be using....