I just got my hands on a Uni-ball Kuru Toga mechanical pencil from Jetpens, a great place to buy Japanese office supplies. This is a pencil that rotates its lead for you, so you don’t need to rotate the pencil to keep an even thickness. This is more of an issue, if like me, you write with your mechanical pencils at an angle. I will admit to being skeptical to the necessity of this mechanism, having tried it, I see a huge difference in the evenness of my writing.

It’s a sharp looking (see what I did there) pencil. The point area is shiny chrome with an inset o-ring in the same color as the colored part of the body. Moving up the grip area is matte aluminum with some wave like indents. I was skeptical that this would feel good, but I was proved wrong, after an hour of sketching and writing I found that the wave like grooves were quite comfortable. At the lower part of the grip is a window to an orange piece. I couldn’t figure out what this was until I started to USE the pencil, there is a little icon that every 20 strokes of the pencil circles through the window, showing you that the lead is in fact rotating. Pretty cool stuff. Without this I’d be hard pressed to even notice that the lead was moving.

The body of the pen is a shimmery pink. This pen is perfect for people who like shimmer mists spray ink, it looks like a solid version of glimmer mists. It shimmers in the light. You know how I feel about shimmery stuff… For a pencil I can allow it, I might even like it.

The clip is shiny silver and sturdy, it has held the pencil to my MTNKO and in my bag without issue. The “knock” or clicker thingie is plastic affixed to a tube of metal that when removed reveals a mini eraser. Uni’s mini erasers are actually quite effective at removing pencil lines, but since mini eraser is mini, it gets used up fast. I always keep a click eraser nearby when using mechanical pencils. The click or knock itself is a satisfying clicky noise that pushes out roughly .5mm with a click.

I really like this pencil, I really like how my writing stays even when using it. It’s not the best for sketching that utilizes a lot of subtle shading as shading and a soft touch defeat the rotation mechanism. To rotate the pencil needs to be lifted from the page, the pressure of your writing or sketching is what causes the rotation. If you write in cursive you are not going to activate the rotation. This pencil is great for printing and works best when doing so. However for my abysmal printing cursive (in which I connect a lot of my letters and print many too) it works great. It also works well for cross hatching and general sketching. Being able to defeat the rotation mechanism and shade softly is a nice touch while sketching.

Uni offers several different versions of this pencil at a variety of price points, you really need to click over to the Jetpens page and scroll to the diagram section where there are several cartoons of frustrated students using other pencils that don’t rotate. Worth the laugh. For those of you who like flowers they offer this pencil with flowers on a shimmery barrel. You can thank me later.

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Basics:

• 9×12 inches, 60 Warm White sheets to a Coil bound pad
• $8.99 at AC Moore
• 70ld/114gsm
• Perfed pages
• Acid free blah blah blah

It seems Canson has a “true to size” sheet thing on almost all of it’s pads now. So if it’s marked 9×12 inches on the cover the sheet you tear off is actually 9×12 inches. This is a really really great thing. I always have hated that many pads would lose a ½ to full inch to the perf. I really like that.

The paper responds well to ink, nibs are true to size and there is no spread or feathering nor soak through on these pages. The paper is not glassy smooth but has enough tooth to accept pencil and charcoal well. It accepted watercolor well, but did show some cockling that did not even out completely when dry. Though it did flatten quite a lot, so that it’s just slightly wavy.

I really enjoyed how this paper accepted ink and watercolor. The watercolors really look great on it’s warm white color and ink melds with the paper in such a way to just look like it’s been there awhile.

 
I’ve been testing several new pens on it and I really  like that the nibs stay true to size and don’t spread all over the place when testing them. Even when my Noodler’s flex pens were flexed to their widest and bleeding ink onto the pages, there was no soak through or bleed through. I can’t stress that enough. It was pretty amazing to find an easily available pad that accepts ink as well as this and for a relatively inexpensive price compared to other fountain pen friendly paper.

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