When Richard emailed me a picture of this Barch-Payzant lettering pen set, I squealed. Oh wonderful world that has such elegant solutions in it.
These pens are forward-weighted; solid brass nibs, light wooden handles.They immediately reminded me of the Indonesian tjanting, used to apply hot wax to cloth for resist batik. Unlike the tjanting, these lettering pens come with knobs. The knobs turn to widen or tighten the gap between the tines. I believe this was more to accommodate liquid media with different levels of viscosity, rather than effect line variation.
The reservoir area slants downward, and the ink pools and exits the tip. Okay, this is the coolest thing ever.
Having recently bought a set of De Atramentis Document Inks, I thought it would be a good experiment to mix them directly in the lettering pen and see what would happen.
I progressively added yellow to what was originally mostly fuchsia. You can see the transition in color from the center outwards. Before laying down the pure yellow at the edges, I rinsed the pen.
This piece uses different sizes of the lettering pens, and different inks.
If you can find your own set, do!