As I continued my research on urban sketches, I came across many examples of amazingly expressive ink and watercolor, especially by artists in Asia.

As I examined images and videos of some of these artists, I noticed that several of them were using fountain pens with bent nibs that could get a variety of line widths.

Some research revealed that these are called fude nib pens.

Fude (foo-deh) is the Japanese word for brush.

Why are these called fude nib pens?

These fountain pens are nothing like a brush; the nibs are made of metal and not flexible at all!

The Japanese word for fountain pen (man nen hitsu) literally means ten thousand year brush.

Before the arrival of the fountain pen in Japan, ink writing was done with a brush that was held upright and perpendicular to the paper.

When people in Japan first tried to write with a fountain pen, they held the pen vertically which resulted in a dry scratchy line.

The fude nib pen was invented so people could write with a fountain pen the same way as they did with their brush.

The tip is bent so that the nib will come in contact with the surface of the paper at a proper angle and deliver ink smoothly.

The only thing these pens have in common with brushes is the fact that you hold them perpendicular to the paper like a brush.

These pens cannot get the fluid line variation of a brush.

However, one unintentional benefit of this unique bent nib is that you can get various line widths by varying the angle.

You get the thinnest line from the reverse side of the nib, a middle width line from near the tip, and the broadest line from the flat surface on the underside.

That ability to get various line widths can make a big difference in an ink drawing even without organic brush strokes.

Of course you can also lift off the nib from the paper and get a tapered line, and you can vary the angle of the pen as you draw for some unpredictable line variation within a stroke.

Despite the Japanese name, apparently the only Japanese fude nib pen that exists is Sailor's Fude DE Mannen. (If anybody knows of any other Japanese fude nib pens, please let me know.)

These pens come in two nib angles.

In this photo the "pearl brown" pen has a 40 degree angle nib and the "young bamboo green" pen has a 55 degree angle nib.

The Sailor website says that the 55 degree angle nib is for people who hold their pen vertically, while the 40 degree nib is for people who hold their pen at a lower angle.

This explains why the Fude DE Mannen has a sharp bend in its nib; it was simply designed to be held at just one angle for writing.

I recall seeing this pen in stores in Japan many years before it was popular with artists.

But artists did eventually discover it, and the Fude DE Mannen became a popular sketching tool, especially with urban sketchers.

Of course, artists will not hold this pen at just one angle for writing, but constantly shift the angle as they draw.

So both ways to use the pen are promoted on the package of my most recent purchase.

Running down the right side is the statement:

Recommended for people who write with their pen upright.

And on the left side it says:

A fountain pen that makes it easy to write brush characters.

Depending on the writing angle, it can write from thick to thin.

And there are illustrations of the nib making marks at three different angles.

So which is the proper way to hold this pen according to Sailor, upright or at an angle?

The answer now is both ways, depending on what you want to do with this pen.

So this pen came to be used both by old people who used a fountain pen to write their New Year cards, and artists who went around drawing city scenes.

But some sketchers were not entirely satisfied with the sharp and abrupt bend in the nib which can seen in the photo below.

Then artists discovered the Chinese fude nib pen with its subtly curved bend for seamless transitions between the line widths.

I think Chinese pen makers were targeting artists when they designed these nibs.

This is the nib of a Jinhao X750 fude nib pen with its curve in the bend. I wrote about these pens in my article, Enter the Chinese bent nib fountain pen.

For this reason a lot of sketchers have switched to Chinese pens, but I still love the Sailor Fude DE Mannen for my particular drawing style.

I'm okay with three distinct line widths (I have several Chinese fude nib pens and I really can't tell much difference).

The Fude DE Mannen's plastic barrel is very light weight, unlike the metal barrels of many Chinese versions, so it's easy to handle. And I can get them so easily in Tokyo.

But a lot of artists have mentioned that the barrel of the Fude DE Mannen is very long, and when the cap is posted it is even longer and unbalanced.

Fortunately this pen is also available as a shorter Profit model with a clip. It is light-weight and well balanced when the cap is posted on the barrel.

It now comes in several colors if you know where to look.

I wanted to get the Profit version, but could't find them in the stores, so I settled for the long version.

But I had a few Sailor Profit Brush Pens that I wasn't using, and was happy to discover that the nib section of the long Fude DE Mannen screwed perfectly into the barrel of a brush pen.

The only difference I can see between this and the actual Fude DE Mannen Profit model is the gold kanji for brush on the cap because it was originally a brush pen.

The young bamboo green pen already had a black nib section so it matches the black Profit barrel perfectly. The pearl brown nib section doesn't quite match, but it resembles a vintage black fountain pen that has an old brown vulcanite nib section.

However, I eventually switched back to the original long barrel because it is more slim and easier for me to manipulate.

And the iconic green barrel makes me feel like I'm part of a world-wide movement of sketch artists who love these pens.

I also like to carry a spare cartridge in the long barrel. But I don't like the way that spare cartridge rattles in the barrel; very distractng. So I found an incredibly simple and effective solution:

Just take a spring from a click-type (knock) ballpoint pen and drop it into the barrel before you store a cartridge. No more rattle!

I happened to have a broken multi ballpoint pen with four springs inside, which was exactly what I needed for two Fude DE Mannen pens plus two Kuretake number 8 brush pens that also had long barrels and spare cartridges. Lesson learned: never throw anything away.

These pens come with two cartridges of Sailor water-soluble black ink, but you can also use Sailor Kiwaguro pigment ink cartridges.

Kiwaguro ink is very black and can be waterproof on some papers, at least so they say; I have not been able to use watercolor on top of Kiwaguro lines because it smudges for me even after the ink has dried for a day.

Sailor makes an ink cartridge converter so you can fill their pens with different fountain pen ink.

You can also fill an empty cartridge with a syringe.

Of the two methods, I prefer filling an empty cartridge with a syringe because I once had the ink leak out of the knob-end of a converter on a hot day, and there was ink everywhere.

A cartridge has only one opening, so presumably the ink would just go into the nib section if it expanded.

Most sketch artists prefer to use Platinum waterproof Carbon Ink so they can go over the ink lines with watercolor, but Carbon ink can dry out in these Sailor pens because the caps are not airtight like Platinum pens.

If you use regular Sailor ink in your pen, Sailor says that you only need to clean it once a year. That is good news for people who hate to clean their fountain pens.

Here are three sketches I did with the brown 40 degree pen. They were colored with my Pentel Multi 8 colored pencil.

On the subway on a 3x5 index card

On the subway on a blank business card

At the zoo on a blank postcard

Only two tools for a variety of stroke widths and colors; now that's portable.

The name explained

Fude de Mannen is a crazy name, so let me untangle it here:

The Japanese word for fountain pen is man nen hitsu (pronounced mahn-nen-hee-tsoo).

It means ten thousand year brush, or the brush that ain't gonna wear out any time soon.

That last kanji for brush can be read two ways:

• hitsu (pronounced hee-tsoo)
• fude (pronounced foo-deh)

Sailor replaced these kanji with hiragana (simpler Japanese characters), rearranged them, and inserted DE to come up with the name fude de man nen (pronounced foo-deh-deh-mahn-nen).

De is a particle for by means of and Sailor put DE in capital letters for a slightly jarring effect (maybe because it came late to the party).

So the name tells us that this is a way to write like a brush by using a fountain pen.

The next few pages will be about developments which kind of bumped fude nib pens off the radar for a while in my life, but these pens will come back and become my main sketching tool several months later. I write about this a few pages later in Enter the Chinese bent nib fountain pen.

The illustrations on this page of the old woman and the urban sketcher were rendered by AI (Microsoft Bing's Copilot) and modified by me.

AI might take over illustration jobs in the future, but it will never take away sketching as a gratifying hobby.

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