Uncapping a New Pen

Hey everybody, Jason Nicholas Nicholas here from The Inspired Life. Hope you're having an awesome day. It is Tuesday, June 11th— June 10th, I was close. Um, it is Tuesday, June 10th. Hope you're having a great afternoon, great morning, evening, whatever time it is. I am popping on really random time, um, with an un uncapping video. You all have heard of unboxing videos. Well, I thought I'd do an uncapping video for a new pen that I just got. So shout out to Mr. Han, aka Roo, for, um, uh, throwing this pen my way and, um, yeah, letting me know about it. So this is unsponsored, from the heart here. Just got it today. I want to try it out, so I do a live stream Who knows what's going to happen? Who knows if I could even get the ink in the pen? But stay tuned, we'll, uh, give it a try and we'll see what it does. I'm going to try on cold press paper, some hot press paper, see if it bleeds, all that fun stuff. So thanks for joining me again. I'm Jason Nicholas Nicholas here with the Inkspired Life. Welcome to this uncapping video. So this pen is a Pilot Parallel Pen. Never heard of it before until, uh, until Roo told me about it. So let's break it open. Got some instructions there. Um, so right off the bat, it looks like it comes with some ink to ink. So it has replaceable ink cartridges in it. It's called a Parallel Pen. It has parallel plate nibs. This is a 2.4mm size. It comes in different diameters or points. I figured this one would be a good one for me to try out. So we have some pieces here. Maybe I'll zoom in a little bit. So you guys can see this closer. Let's bring the camera in a smidge. We got this, we got this. Just gotta go here, zoom it a little bit. All right, hopefully you guys can see that a little bit better. Cool. Um, cap, some kind of ID tag, I'm not sure what that is, and I guess this is a something for ink, refilling the ink. I, I, I really don't know. Um, again, this is totally unrehearsed. I have no idea. I just opened this package up, and that's what makes this fun and exciting. It's always cool trying out new pens. So we have an instruction sheet here. Um, let's just kind of look and see what this says. Pen unit, ink cartridges. Yep, so we have two ink cartridges. It looks like a red and a black one here. Oh, this is a pipette for cleaning the pen unit, as the instructions say. All right, so we got something to clean the pen with. Um, let's take a look at the pen itself. Here's the nib on here. Interesting. So it's a metal nib. It's kind of square, which is interesting. So we'll see what happens. I don't know how close I can get, but there are two of these metal nibs kind of next to each other. So let's, uh, let's put the ink in. I'm not going to read the instructions. I do read IKEA instructions. I love building IKEA furniture. I do love reading those instructions. They're just so cool to look at. If you If you haven't checked out IKEA instructions— I know I'm off topic, but that's me. Um, I just love the art, the graphics in IKEA instructions. They're fun. So I'm unscrewing the top here. So let's do the black ink. So I'm gonna just pop it in, I'm gonna push it down, and then we're gonna tighten the barrel up. All right, so the plastic— the pen is made out of plastic. It's kind of flimsy, you know, it's not the strongest plastic. I feel like it could crack easily. Um, it was a $12 pen, so that was the price. We got the cap. Cap screws on. It has this kind of cool design on the end. I like it, makes it easy to hold while you're unscrewing it. On and off. Pretty cool. All right, so this is 2.4 millimeters. Let's, uh, throw some pen here. This is just— this is LAMY plain paper, the Tomoe River paper I love using in my LAMYs all the time. And I don't know how long it takes the ink to come out or not come out, so I have to get it started a little bit. This is where you can start singing a song or humming to yourself. While we get the ink to come through. Let's see. Boom! I thought it'd be fun just to do all this live. There we go. Whoa, it's coming out! All right, let's zoom in closer. This is exciting. I know, I know, I'm geeking out over a pen, but you know what? Come on, guys, I'm not the only one out there, right? All right, cool. So it kind of has like a calligraphy mark. Let's just do a sketch and see what happens. Hopefully I'm on camera. All right, so I'm just going to sketch kind of a— there's a random thing here. So it's really, it's really interesting. I love because it has the kind of the flat end, so right, you can just drag and get these really cool, nice horizontal thick lines. If I turn the pen 90 degrees, here's the thin edge. Boom. So you can get anywhere in between the thin and the thick just by rotating it. So let's try it. I'm just gonna do some squiggly lines here. It's definitely going to take some practice to get the feel of it. Pretty awesome. Hey, Arasat, I see you. Great to see you. It's been a while. Good to see you on the YouTube side of things. Um, interesting. All right, let me, let me try to sketch just a little bridge sketch here. Let's see, let's just go to another sheet of paper. I'm gonna flip it over. So again, if you're just joining me, welcome. I am testing out a new pen, never used it before, so you guys are the first to see me breaking this out, giving it a shot, inking things up. Inking Out Loud, that was the original name of my YouTube thing a while ago. I used to call it Inking Out Loud. I kind of like it. Um, I don't know why I changed it. So I'm gonna do a sketch of, uh, the Brooklyn Bridge maybe, or something bridge-inspired. We'll see how the pen does its thing. Cool. So there you go, got a quick sketch of the Brooklyn Bridge. Hey Sheila, great to see you on Facebook. Hope all's well. All right, so, um, how am I liking this pen so far? So again, this is a Pilot Parallel pen. I love, uh, what do you call that, alliteration. I'm a huge alliteration fan. So it's a Pilot Parallel pen, peeps, right there, boom, with parallel plate nib, which is cool. So it really is like a calligraphy type of pen. So if anybody does calligraphy out there, you'll probably be able to handle this a lot better than me. I'm not a calligrapher. Is that the right word? Calligrapher. But how is it to handle? I— it's gonna take a little bit of getting used to, to be honest with you. Um, I'm finding, you know, to get the effects I want, I have to rotate my wrist so I go from the thin point. I'll do it up here. So, you know, if I hold it horizontal, this is the thinnest kind of line I can get with it, but If I turn the other way, that's the widest. And if I'm going to go in between as I'm sketching, I'm going to have to kind of practice this loosening up a lot more than I usually am because I'm pretty loose and just kind of bringing it across, turning the barrel as I'm bringing it across. So I have to really loosen up when I'm using— when I use it. So I'm sure that is not the best effect of it. You can see on the bridge, what I liked about the bridge is, say I want to darken the arches here, I can just use the wide part. Boom. Watch, I'll really pull, pop these arches out. I do love the scratchy sound of it. Listen here, we'll do a little ASMR. Let's see if we can capture this. Oh yeah, nothing like good old pen ASMR. Love that. Um, I love the sound it makes as it hits the paper. Let's break it out on some cold press watercolor paper and bleed the ink and see how we like it. Cool, this is so much fun. All right, so this is cold press watercolor paper, Fabriano. I do have some water, I have my brush here as well, um, and let's just bleed some ink on it. Iris Arrow said, I find holding the pen at 45 degrees helps with the shifting from flat to thick. Hey, that's a great tip, thank you so much. I'm going to try that. I'll hold it more of a 45-ish degree angle. I'm going to zoom out a little bit, guys, because I want to show, um, show you more of the paper I'm using. No, I'm going to zoom out, not in. Silly. There we go. All right, let's try that. All right. Hey, if you're watching on Instagram, hello! At 45 degrees, and I'm just gonna be quiet. I'm gonna actually move the mic down a little bit and pick up the sounds. All right, cool. All right, there you go. So, um, did some bleeding on that. Yeah, so off the bat, I like the way it feels better on hot press paper than the cold press paper. Um, I do notice a lot, you know, a little bit of ink goes a long way on this. So I overloaded it. Look at all that black ink on there. It looks pretty cool. I like the way it bleeds. But the pen, yeah, so the pen right now I'm liking. Um, I definitely need to practice with it a bit more to get the feel of it. It's a little awkward right now for me to hold it, um, and to maneuver it the way I want to. This is gonna— maybe I need to hold it further from the end like this. Maybe think of it more like a paintbrush, kind of. I think that's going to be more effective for me instead of thinking so much. You may have noticed, like, when I think a lot when I'm sketching, I tense up and my lines are a lot— it's not as interesting, honestly. It's kind of boring. I think my sketches look boring for me and I feel kind of bored. I need to really be loose. Kind of on the fly, kind of really slinging that ink down. So when I was doing this, I'm really— I was focusing a lot on, oh, how do I hold the pen, how do I do this? I think I need to do a session where I'm just doing it, I'm not thinking. So that's kind of what was happening right here. Like, this is my style if I just wing it. You know, maybe we're just— it's obviously just random shapes here. I just splattered some ink. Poncho not included. There we go. Boom. So I just need to loosen up with it. Hopefully that makes sense. So there you go. So that is my uncapping, first time ever using the Pilot Parallel pen. This is unsponsored, just me doing my thing, having fun. Yeah, I'm definitely going to use it more, play around with it a lot more. I'll probably mess around with it even more tonight. Um, it's cool. I love the concept though. I love the concept of being able to have these thick and thin lines. So calligraphers, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Um, I did calligraphy a long, long, long time ago. Probably— I was probably in my teen— like a teenager when I was doing it. I remember I got this cool calligraphy kit, probably, I think it was like a birthday gift, and it was so fun. I don't know why I stopped doing it. I should have— I wish I hadn't kept up with it. I think calligraphy is a beautiful art form. But, um, so I got a lot of practice to do on this, guys. But thank you so much for tuning in, watching this uncapping video. A lot more to do. I'm going to focus a lot this summer on pens and bringing you guys different pen information. Just testing out cool stuff. And I have to be honest with you, I, I'm going back to ballpoint type pens. I love them the most right now. So I know I'm a little off the uncapping video, but we're— here's, here's like one of the pens I bought recently right there. And I'm gonna sneeze, I think. Where are my other ones? They're here somewhere. Oh, here. Here's like a Pilot one I bought. Sorry, guys. Oh, here's the other one. So really cool pens. I'll do more videos about them, um, just trying random stuff. And you know what, sometimes I think we feel like we need to be really fancy schmancy with, with, with our art tools, our supplies. I am getting too old to be fancy schmancy. I want to be Simple Simon. I really want to simplify, simplify, simplify what I'm carrying, what I'm sketching with, what I'm painting with, even if I'm painting. Um, yeah, I don't know, the watercolors might go to the wayside for a little while. I might just focus on going back to pen, back to the basics. And I think that's going to be a fun, fun thing to do. So all about simplifying the older I get. Appreciate you guys so much. Thank you for watching. I'm Jason Nicholas Nicholas with the Inkspired Life, where I love sketching architecture, urban sketching, maybe in New York City this weekend. We'll see how the weather is. And I just love sharing my creativity, my thoughts, my And hopefully my positive vibes with you guys. That's what this is about. I believe in using your creativity for positivity. It doesn't have to be sketching. It could be painting, cooking, baking, dancing, uh, crocheting. It doesn't matter. Whatever your thing is, your hobby is, bring a positive attitude to it and spread that infectious positivity out there because we definitely need it. Out there in the world. All right, remember, you too can sketch architecture and the world around you one line at a time. All right, so I'm back on next time. Peace out.